Blood Red Sea

8

They ran from the chaos behind them like boy sprinters, with no plan but to keep running. There was still a chance they might hide themselves somewhere, in the maze of alleyways and courtyards of the ruined city, or some dank cellar.

Arquebuses cracked out behind them, only two or three rooms back.

They clattered down stone steps and into a small courtyard, where Stanley and Smith whirled their swords and cut down two astonished guards on the gate. A hue and cry went up and a hundred men came after them.

Bektasis.

Somehow they found a moment’s respite in a quiet street, beneath an archway. But they would be found soon.

They sank down wearily and Mazzinghi took a slug of water from his flask. A last drink.

‘On your feet, my brother Luigi Mazzinghi,’ said Giustiniani, his voice very gentle amid the approaching yells and curses. He took the young knight’s arm, for it was trembling as he held his sword. ‘On your feet, my courageous English gentlemen. Before heaven, I know you have been brave fellows, and I would as willingly die beside you as any Knight Hospitaller.’

There were tears in the old man’s eyes. They had all heard the cry of the Bektasis, surging towards them like the sound of hell unloosed. Allahu akbar! Death to the unbelievers!

And, more soul destroying, they heard an old woman calling out in Greek from an upper window, ‘There they are! There are the Franks!’

There would be no call to surrender now. This was a sack, with no quarter given: chaotic and bloody yet carefully calculated by Lala Mustafa, most ruthless of military commanders, so that Famagusta should hear of its atrocities and promptly surrender without a fight.

Smith raised his sword high. ‘Acre! Jerusalem! Malta!’

Round the end of the street came a horde half hidden in a cloud of roiling dust. They glimpsed topknots and henna tattoos, white teeth, flashing steel. There was a dervish racing towards them with a scimitar in one hand and a severed head in the other. Most fought naked, already daubed with blood. Some were sexually excited. Their eyes were bloodshot and maddened, rolling in their heads. The Bektasis were so holy and beloved of Allah, they even allowed themselves to drink alcohol. Nothing impure could harm ones already so purified by fire and blood and the love of God.

Much of the Ottoman army, especially the Janizary regiments, had nothing but contempt for these savages, and others said they were no part of the religion of the Prophet, but of Shaitan. Nevertheless, as Lala Mustafa well knew, they had their uses. Savagery and terror, principally.

Nicholas laid his hand on Hodge’s shoulder one last time.

Hodge raised his sword too. ‘For England,’ he said softly. ‘For what it’s bloody well worth.’

Giustiniani pulled them back into the archway, where at least they could not be outflanked, and might pile up the bodies before them.

The Bektasis were not thirty yards away. They had seen their armour, their swords shining, and were howling, running.

Smith glanced back into the small courtyard behind them, open to the sky, surrounded by low buildings. At the back of the courtyard was a high wall. With a door in the far corner.

He glanced out of the archway again. They were coming. One came ahead of all the others. He flailed his arms at them. Stanley struck him down.

Smith sprinted back across the courtyard and tried the door. Bolted, unyielding as a rock. The wall was twelve feet high. Stanley had one pot-bomb left hanging from his belt, just one, but it was too precious.

Giustiniani read him immediately and drew the others back to form a small triangle, standing five abreast across the corner. They formed a tight line that could not be outflanked, bristling with blades. God send the Bektasis had no guns or they would simply shoot them down. But they always preferred scimitars. More blood.

Now the howling dervishes swarmed through the archway towards them, a flesh-coloured tide.

Stanley reached out and grabbed a donkey-barrow that stood against the wall, and with one giant heave, turned it on its side. A singe small obstacle, but it might help.

Behind them, Smith was hurling himself at the bolted door.

It wouldn’t budge.

The crowd of fifty or more came towards them, chanting, jabbing spears in the air. Many more surged on down the narrow street. Somewhere a woman screamed.

Stanley reached for the single pot-bomb on his belt.

‘A moment more,’ murmured Giustiniani. He held a smoking matchcord close to the pot-bomb’s short fuse. Even his veteran hands were shaking. Sweat stung his eyes.

The Bektasis were doing a kind of dance of death.

Oh, to have one small field gun full of grapeshot. But it would be hand to hand and ten to one.

Smith hurled himself at the door again. Still it did not budge.

One Bektasi rushed at them, ecstatic, smiling, swinging his spear almost uselessly. Mazzinghi clouted it aside, took a single brisk step forward, skewered him through the throat with a thrust of his sword, planted his foot in the fellow’s chest and pushed him off it, and took one step back into line as the fellow was still falling to the ground.

The horde howled, dancing, their spears weaving in the air before them. Six feet in front of them. A single charge and they were done.

And more were climbing up on the roofs of the buildings around the courtyard, coming almost behind them to hurl down tiles and stones.

Smith drove himself at the door.

‘Now!’ said Giustiniani.

The matchcord touched the fuse, it fizzed into life, and Stanley lobbed it high over the horde before them.

‘Down!’

They ducked low, squatting, faces lowered, hands over their heads. The pot-bomb exploded in the air. They stood again, instantly reforming.

The heart of the horde had been flattened by the blast of nails, glass and potsherds like a field of wheat under a hailstorm.

‘Forward!’ cried Giustiniani, and as one they stepped up to the front rank of still-bewildered dervishes. Nicholas bent one knee and drove his sword forward long and hard. He caught his man in the thigh and he went down groaning, surprised. He could not finish him off before two more came forward and they all stepped back into line within the enclosed space of the walls.

Then they were under full attack.

Nicholas had not fought like this since Malta, and yet for the first few moments that seemed to last so long, it was horribly easy. These were no trained soldiers but fanatics, ardent to die and go to paradise. They came on to the sacrifice willingly. Yet after only a minute or two of duck, thrust and skewer, the five were blood-slathered to the shoulder, and all but Stanley, perhaps, were beginning to tire in the sword-arm. It was exhaustion that would kill them, exhaustion alone, swamped by sheer numbers.

Then Mazzinghi was cut, a long spear thrust more calculated than most, which laid his temple open to the bone and blinded him in one eye with his own blood, so that he could no longer judge distance and scale.

‘Get that door open, Smith!’ roared Giustiniani, hacking down another spearman. ‘Hit it again!’

Hodge took a savage blow to his left arm from a studded cudgel, and sank to one knee with the pain. Nicholas whirled his sword over him and caught the assailant a shallow slashing cut across the side of his neck. The Bektasi stepped back, not mortally wounded, and another came on in his place.

Beyond the howling, there were sounds of a city being raped. But for them, for now, the whole vast battlefield of the central Cyprus plain, the fall of this great walled city of ten thousand, had shrunk to this single courtyard, and an old wooden door with a bolt that wouldn’t budge.

Then Mazzinghi cracked.

He shot his bloody sword home in its scabbard, vaulted forward on to the side of the donkey-barrow, and then leapt up with a spring that only a young man in terror could perform. It was just enough for him to reach the top of the courtyard wall, holding on by his fingertips. He swung left and right, legs flailing. A spear clattered into the wall not a hand’s breadth away from him, and then he swung far enough to hitch his right foot up on top of the wall. He rolled over, dropped down the other side and was gone.

The cowardice made them redouble their ruthless sword-work. At least they’d not die like that yellow Florentine.

Smith abandoned the door and drew his sword and pressed forward into the line.

‘Remember Acre!’ he bellowed.

It was in the final flurry of slashes and thrusts, all of them half blinded now by dust and sweat, arms barely able to raise their blades, that they heard the sound of a bolt being shot, and knew from the way the sound opened up that the door behind them was ajar. And there stood Mazzinghi.

They seized the moment of chaos and opportunity, Nicholas kicking one last fellow hard on the kneecap, and then they were back through the doorway.

Smith put his less battered shoulder to the door and slammed it shut again. A dervish had his arm through the door. It must have been half severed by the door slamming shut with all of Smith’s weight behind it. Smith wrenched the door open one last time, as if exasperated, punched the fellow full in the face, and slammed it shut a second time, shooting the heavy bolt.

It would buy them all of a few seconds. Other Bektasis were already coming over the wall above them.

‘Run!’

They tore round the corner into a wider street, and there was a column of two hundred fresh Janizaries ahead of them, eight abreast, long wheel-lock muskets held across their chests.

They might have been a different army.

Behind them they could hear the soft thunder of two or three hundred bare brown feet. Silent now. Intent.

The Janizary captain shouted an order, and the front rank raised their muskets, setting the butts not against their chests but nestled hard into their shoulders in the modern style.

The Bektasis came on behind them.

They were done for.

Yet even in this last moment, Giustiniani had to speak.

‘Fra Luigi,’ he gasped, ‘forgive me, I doubted you. I thought you had fled us.’

Mazzinghi actually managed a last grin as he raised an empty, bloody hand, facing the execution of the Janizary muskets. ‘Forget it, Brother. Pardon all.’

The captain shouted again, and dropped his straightened arm imperiously.

‘He means us!’ shouted Stanley, suddenly understanding. ‘Drop!’

They hit the ground just as a disciplined volley cracked out from the Janizary front rank. It was aimed to sheer just over the heads of the onrushing Bektasis, who even in their opiate delirium and bloodlust came to a jumbled halt, scimitars trailing, staring.

‘Hold yourselves back!’ roared the Janizary captain. ‘These six are in our custody now!’

The six lay still in the dust while the two factions stood opposing one another. Then the captain called out once more, clear and commanding, and used the name ‘Lala Mustafa’.

The Bektasis muttered dark curses and eyed each other. Then they slunk away and were gone.

The six lay still. Out of the frying pan, into the fires of hell. They had been found out. They had been taken prisoner as knights. And instead of quick slaughter at the hands of the Bektasis, a far worse fate now awaited them. Led captive to Lala Mustafa himself, and death by slow and exemplary torture.