Blood Red Sea

7

The people were fleeing into the heart of the city, taking to roofs or cellars like maddened animals. An old man, stark naked, crawled into a barrel and started to giggle. But Nicholas had seen such sights before. The madness of war. Now it was time to steel yourself. Nothing was normal. He wound up his shirt front tightly and wrung out the dead man’s blood. It trickled to the dusty ground, still warm.

‘Below!’ cried Smith, sword in hand. ‘To me!’

All was chaos, but at least the rumours about the Famagusta Gate were false. As cannonballs hurtled in overhead, the ground shaking with huge thumps, and walls and buildings behind them collapsing with a slow, distant rumble, they formed up before the great eastern gate of the city. Paolo dal Guasto was already there with his company, pikes at the ready.

But the gate, at least, had been heavily bulked, on Dal Guasto’s initiative. On the outward face the stonework was all shock-absorbing slopes and angles, and the huge oak gates themselves were covered with overlapping plate metal. Behind that, most simple but most effective of all, was the bulking. A mix of bales of straw, barrels full of sand, stone blocks and sacks of earth, as deep as a barn full of hay. Unlike impressive stone walls, such soft bulking actually absorbed the hammer-blows of cannonballs rather than resisted them. No cannonball on earth could go through it.

Smith grunted approval. ‘The Turk will have to start building defences for himself, right up against the walls, before he can begin lifting and carrying away all this. Like a peasant carting bales of hay from the meadow.’

Stanley joined them. There was blood on his sleeves, and another dead soldier back in the street behind. He had died without even a taste of opium. There was none in the city.

Giustiniani said, ‘It’s mining that brings down cities.’

There was a lull in the bombardment again while the Turkish guns cooled. They crept up on to the walls once more. Stanley peered out, and told the younger three to do likewise.

‘What are we looking for?’ asked Mazzinghi, whispering unnecessarily.

Stanley grinned. ‘You’re looking for where there’s nothing.’

Smith started almost immediately. ‘There, damn it. Just off to the left.’

They all looked. There was one section of the wicker breastwork and earth rampart where a gun barrel poked out, but no gun team was working to cool it with buckets of warm water. Cold water could crack the barrel, even a piece of bronze weighing more than a pair of oxen. It was as if this gun hadn’t been fired. As if it was merely for cover.

And then Nicholas saw a man with a spade.

Smith was already unslinging his jezail.

‘Take us to the countermining tunnels,’ said Stanley. ‘Fast.’

Dal Guasto wore a look of shame on his face.

Stanley said, ‘Don’t tell me. .’

Dal Guasto said, ‘The Governor thought we had not the manpower to countermine. He said our walls were impregnable anyway.’

Smith lowered his jezail in sheer despair. This siege was almost over. And the end would not be good.

They had come too late. Always too few, always too late.

‘Truly,’ murmured Smith, shaking his head, ‘truly my Lord Niccolo Dandolo, you are a dunce and a dog’s arsehole.’

They threaded their way back into the city, the four knights in a silent daze. Past the haggard gaze of the last few groups of soldiers, past the heaps of the slain, past the emaciated faces of the townspeople. The general stench of decay and exhaustion told their story.

‘Nicosia is lost. We must plan for Famagusta.’

‘Aye,’ said Smith, ‘we know when Lala Mustafa will be in now.’

‘When?’ said Mazzinghi.

‘Just as soon as the mines have been blown and the last stones have fallen back to earth.’

‘I am sorry,’ said Giustiniani, bowing his grizzled old head. ‘My brothers, my brave souls, we have come on a suicide mission. Just in time to see Nicosia fall. And if we ourselves are only taken captive in chains, we’ll be lucky.’

‘If we become separated,’ said Stanley, ‘we should head towards the Governor’s palace. The last act will be there.’

‘There are three courses open to us, I think,’ said Giustiniani. ‘We can lie down and play dead, and hope to escape. A fairy-tale escape, in truth. The Turks will just throw us alive on to a pyre. We can fight to the death, heroic to the end, achieving nothing for the world. Or we surrender and live to fight another day.’

‘Never,’ said Smith.

‘Fighting to the death is wasted,’ countered Giustiniani. ‘We are needed at Famagusta — if we can get there, after this, somehow.’

‘It is over for us,’ said Smith, buckling his plate tighter.

And then the mines went up.

Nicholas had never seen or heard anything like it, nor ever would again. The final assault on Birgu at Malta had been nothing compared to this: destruction so total and unopposed.

In a matter of seconds, so perfectly organized was the Ottoman assault, all three of the city’s great gates, Famagusta, Paphos and Kyrenia, were sent sky high. It was as if an earthquake had been cross-bred with a volcano.

The arch where they sheltered trembled with the explosions. Nicholas looked up to see the very keystone above his head shaken and half dislodged. But Stanley yelled, ‘Stay where you are! Cover your heads! Do not step out from the arch!’

All the massive bulking behind the gates, that barn-deep mass of material which no cannonball on earth could have ploughed through, was hurled clean into the air. For the expert Armenian and Mameluke sappers had tunnelled precisely underneath it, barely a foot below, the thin ground above their heads held up by little more than pit props. Then they had rammed the tunnels tight with as many as two hundred barrels of highest-quality gunpowder, lit the long matchcord soaked in pitch. . and run.

Bales of hay and sacks of straw too heavy for a man to lift were sent spiralling into the air as if in slow motion, coming back to land some time later, thumping down on to rooftops or in distant squares. Some bales simply detonated, the air filled with dried grass and grass halms, and the sweet scent of summer hay meadows, along with the black, bitter tang of gunpowder. A drum of marble from some ancient column was tossed up and then crashed down on to a pretty little fountain in a street behind. A barrel rolling as fast as a horse could gallop smashed into a fellow trying to run away.

And then there came a great roar of thousands of men, rushing all three gates simultaneously, spears and scimitars ready for close-quarter work. Men who had waited for weeks under the blazing sun, bored, restless, sometimes falling sick, for the fall of this stubborn city which had so foolishly refused surrender. Now it was time for just punishment.

‘Not Janizaries!’ came one last desperate cry from a wall. ‘Bektasis!’

Irregulars, dervishes, fanatics. God-crazed connoisseurs of opium, rape and slaughter.

Only moments later, as the six of them raced down a narrow alley, heading for the Governor’s palace and the last stand, there was another gigantic explosion. A deafening eruption of timber and stone. It must have been a powder store. Why hadn’t the powder been brought up to the walls for use? But now either some last desperate defender still in his wits had put a flame to it to destroy it, and deprive the Turks of the use of it, or it had been detonated by some stray pot-bomb or spark.

They would never know. The alley collapsed around them, silently, for they were already deafened, and they were lost to each other in a sandstorm of limestone dust.

Later Nicholas tried to find his way to the palace again, alone, ears ringing, swordless, wanting only to be reunited with his comrades so he should not die alone. Amid the dust clouds and chaos he wandered like a wraith, amid the terrible randomness of the city’s sacking. As if he were marked like Cain, it seemed no man, not even a Mussulman, dared to raise his hand against him. He reeled rather than walked, his own blood now around his neck, and a strange shaking weakness in his left arm that he did not investigate further.

He saw a little girl of no more than six or seven, stone dead but still standing as if stuck to the wall. He thought of his sisters, and pulled her from the wall and laid her down and cursed that he had no covering to give her, looking over her heartful and speechless. He didn’t even stir when another cannonball, fired pointlessly now the city was taken, smacked into a wall only feet away and covered him afresh with dust.

In a nightmare without sound, he saw people wandering about as slowly as himself, but purposeless. He saw a Turk come up behind a woman walking along with her head down, thoughtfully, and run her through. Once she was down, the Turk knelt and started to rummage under her skirts.

Wait, wait, he said to himself, dust gritty between his teeth. Make it to the palace. Find them. Fight another day.

He saw terraces and balconies pointlessly raked by point-blank gunfire, and from the Tripoli bastion, Turks fired down canisters of shot into the crowded, wailing square. He saw them cut off an old woman’s head and toss it in her serving maid’s lap, and other images that engraved themselves indelibly in his mind and memory, and would waken him from nightmares, sweat soaked and panting, for many years to come.

Everywhere there was treachery and despair, bickering over loot, petty vengeance. A defeat was always soul destroying, but especially one so cowardly and chaotic as this. And yet even amid the carnage and chaos, he saw a mule peacefully tearing little weeds from a wall, and a cat licking her kittens in a cellar doorway.

His hearing came back, accompanied by ringing. He armed himself like a peasant with a long-handled goad he found inside a stable doorway, slipped down a back alley and through a house, then made it over flat rooftops until he was close to the palace. There was a group of Turks singing down below in a courtyard, as if it was all over, but from within the palace came the sound of gunfire. Twice he was challenged as he clambered along, and once a crossbow bolt clattered over the roof near by. He waved his makeshift spear in the air and called Allahu akbar! and pulled down his shirt to show his own blood. None of it made any sense, but they left him in peace.

He went as far as he could go along the rooftops, dropped down into a yard with a tethered goat, went through a stone barn and a back window thick with pigeon droppings. He wedged the goad under his back-belt, climbed up a wooden post and over a loosely tiled roof, sending them skimming to the ground below, climbed in another window, and dropped down on to cool flagstones. He was in a larder. There was even a stone basin in the corner, and a ewer.

He drank the ewer almost empty, poured the rest over his head, rubbed his face with his sleeve. His head felt clearer. He remembered a stag hunt back in Shropshire, when he was still but fourteen and had never killed a man. The stag reach the river’s edge, exhausted, trembling in every limb, almost finished, as the hounds bounded towards it, spittled tongues lolling. The stag drank about a gallon of water and was revived as if by magic. It forded the river and then bolted away up the steep hill faster than any hound could run.

He breathed in the cool damp air of the larder, then headed towards the gunfire.

He ran down a corridor thick with black gunpowder smoke and up a fine carved wooden staircase. He vaulted over a dead man with his throat slit. Somewhere in this palace, the last battle was being fought, and he knew his comrades were there.

The mood was coming upon him again now: ferocious and sublime. The mood he lived for. He knew that some power watched over him, that he would not die, not today. That he could do anything.

He grimaced as he ran, other men’s blood still on him, thinking that this was what the Bektasi felt.

Musket fire raked over his head and splintered a fine wood-panelled wall behind him. A ball may have whispered past his cheek. Then he jabbed a musketeer’s throat with the goad and pulled him down. He seized the musket like a club and struck a second fellow sidelong, but it was a poor blow. He had to draw the musket back and use it again in an instant, not easy with so heavy a weapon, as the fellow brought down his barrel in a long jabbing motion towards his stomach. He just managed to parry the blow and knock it aside while rolling, came up and kicked the fellow behind his knees. Then he was on him and had smashed his head two-handed into the floor so he didn’t move again. He dropped the musket and took his sword. It was an inferior weapon but better than an empty hand.

He dropped into a small room and knelt against the wainscot, gasping. They were fighting room to room, and he was behind the Ottoman lines.

He went climbing. In a narrow, shadowy corner of the palace he ascended a steep spiral staircase until it reached a high-vaulted attic room, leaned out of a narrow window, turned on his back and looked up. Possible. Then he was out and drawing himself up, slowly, slowly. Weight on your legs, arms will tire. Climb it like a ladder. Feet sideways on, sometimes perching on nubbins of stone no bigger than crab apples, fingers clutching cracks in the stones. But enough, holding himself tight to the wall. Forty feet up from the ground. A startled white dove took off and almost killed him.

He pulled himself over a ledge and moved along between two steep-pitched rooftops. He knew he was near when a wooden shutter erupted in a deadly hail of splinters just feet ahead of him. He dropped down, crawled beneath it and then bobbed up as fast as he could and glanced within. With the accelerated senses that danger brings, he saw a dark arquebus barrel already turning on him, the matchcord smoking. He ducked down again as the gun fired a ball through his hair, and yelled out, ‘St Michael and St George!’

A mighty hand, black with powder smoke and burns, grabbed him by the edge of his jerkin and hauled him inside.

Smith.

‘What kept you?’ he growled.

‘I thought you were dead,’ said Hodge.

‘How did you all find each other?’ said Nicholas.

‘We never lost each other. Only you.’

They were in a lofty vaulted chamber with a huge stone fireplace, bearing the lion crest of Venice above the lintel. But now was not the time to appreciate architectural features. Besides, the chamber was still drifting with black smoke.

One end was massively barricaded with a dark oak table on its side. Stanley crouched behind it. He stood swiftly, fired straight through the wooden panelling, reloading furiously. The muzzle smoked.

There were about twenty men in all here. Four or five were dead or dying.

Why had he come?

Then the doors at the other end of the chamber were flung open, and there stood none other than Governor Niccolo Dandolo himself. He had donned his finest crimson robe for the occasion, and wore neither sword nor armour.

Their guns fell silent. Beyond the barricaded door, the Turks were still shouting.

‘Gentlemen,’ said Dandolo, imperturbably serene. ‘We have done all we can. It is time to give ourselves into Ottoman hands, with dignity intact.’

Not five feet from him, a young Venetian pikeman was spluttering his last breath, a musket ball in his lungs.

There was a sudden movement, and Captain Paolo dal Guasto was at Dandolo’s side. His expression was dark and contorted as he drew back his sword.

‘Dal Guasto, no!’ cried Giustiniani.

Dandolo turned, oblivious of danger to the last. But then one of his bodyguards standing behind him raised his pike high in the air and brought the heavy iron head slamming down upon Dal Guasto’s bare skull. He fell like a poleaxed heifer.

Stanley ran to the fallen captain. He who had held the bastion of San Luca to the very last minute, even after half of it was destroyed by the mines. Dal Guasto was taut and shaking, his eyes rolling. Stanley knew he was done for.

The pikeman was impassive. What point was there in anything now? It was all too typical. But let the last wretched scene be played out.

‘Draw back that table,’ said Dandolo. ‘We shall present ourselves.’

They hauled back the heavy oak table and then hurried to the opposite end of the chamber, fifteen desperate, panting men. Dandolo stood alone before the holed and splintered double doors and drew them open.

Beyond, it was carnage. The Turks were dragging away the dead bodies of their comrades to make space for further attacks. Somewhere below, a team was actually trying to bring a field gun up the stairs. They had fought half the length of the palace, room by room, a savage and bitter fight in a city already fallen. But rumours flew that there were Knights of St John in the palace, guarding Dandolo to the end.

That would explain it.

Finally the smoke cleared, and there was a Janizary commander with his hand raised, his men twitching but obedient.

Dandolo gave a curt bow. ‘At your service.’

The commander grinned an unsettling grin and strode into the room. His scimitar was gripped tight in his right hand.

‘We have our orders for your capture already, from Lala Mustafa,’ he said. ‘I shall have pleasure in following them to the letter.’

Dandolo frowned. Understanding nothing to the last. The commander took a two-handed grip on his scimitar and swept it cleanly through the air at shoulder height.

The head fell to the floor with a hollow thunk, brains leaking. The surprised trunk in its crimson robe toppled sideways a few moments later.

The commander signalled to his men and they swarmed in. One picked up the severed head and dropped it into a sack. Two more took the headless trunk by its arms and legs and went over to the window. They swung it back and forth a couple of times and then slung it out.

The mortal remains of Governor Niccolo Dandolo tumbled through the air, crimson robe billowing, and came to land with an ugly thump. A great cry went up from the soldiers outside. It was over.

The Janizary commander eyed the huddle of men in the far doorway. A mere dozen or so, but their expressions were grim rather than placatory or pleading, and they still gripped their weapons. They had fought hard. He indicated the floor with the point of his scimitar. Behind him, a dozen arquebuses were trained on them.

Then one of their number, a bull-like figure with burning eyes and black beard speckled with grey, produced something from behind his back.

Something with a smoking matchcord.

Smith tossed it in the air.