Blood Red Sea

14

He hurried through the streets to their billet, and was directed to the landward bastion of the west wall. Below the bastion was a maze of tunnels, chambers, powder stores and, most important of all, gun rooms, where the dark muzzles of slim culverins and field guns nosed out through narrow niches, ready to give enfilading fire across the entire breadth of Famagusta’s walls. Any attacking enemy would be mown down like summer grass.

He raced up the steps, head low. At the top, lying behind the sloping ramp where the defenders sheltered, he found Smith, Stanley and Hodge.

Hodge eyed him. ‘You look drained. Refreshing night’s sleep?’

‘Just jealousy.’

‘Where’s your helmet, you ass?’ growled Smith.

In his hurry he had left it at the widow’s.

Running back with the helmet he heard a voice call from behind.

‘Master Nicholas of England!’

It couldn’t be. He spun round.

It was. Abdul of Tripoli.

‘If I didn’t know better, I’d think you were stalking me. How the devil did you get into the city?’

‘The fortunes of war,’ said Abdul, typically vague. ‘Look.’ And he produced a long, slender object wrapped in oiled white linen. ‘Where is your friend Smit?’

‘Follow me. That’s not. . is it?’

It was. Abdul knelt before Smith and unwrapped the bundle. There lay his beloved Persian jezail.

Smith snatched it up, eyes shining like a boy’s on his birthday. He leaned on the wall and sighted down the barrel. It was perfect.

Behind him, Abdul coughed. ‘I am glad you like my musket, sire.’

Smith snapped back, ‘Your musket?’

‘Indeed. Many dangers I endured to keep it to myself. Now I will sell it to you.’

‘Sell it to me?’ Smith looked as if he was about to reach out and wring Abdul’s neck where he knelt.

‘He’s right, Smith,’ said Stanley mildly. ‘It was yours. Now it is his. You must pay the man.’

Eyes now shining with a darker, more dangerous light, Smith said, ‘How much?’

Abdul named his price.

‘Curses and leprosy on you, Moor, I don’t have that kind of money.’

‘Yet you know it is worth twice that amount.’

The damnable thing was, the Moor was right.

‘I will take a promissory oath from you, for the full amount to be paid within the month.’

‘We’ll be dead in a month.’

‘You, perhaps. Not me. Then I will just take back the jezail from your cold hands. Like a pawnbroker. Otherwise, that is my price. Plus ten per cent.’

‘You sure you have no Jewish blood?’

Abdul just smiled.

‘And why the devil is a Moor selling guns to a Christian?’

‘Christians sell guns to Moors often enough,’ said Abdul sharply. ‘I have seen English arms merchants with my own eyes in Casablanca and Marrakesh. In return they take back good quantities of saltpetre, that key ingredient in the single most delicious recipe ever cooked up by the hand of man: ten parts saltpetre, two parts charcoal, a measure and a half of sulphur. Grind to a fine powder, and there you have it. Boom!’

Smith scowled furiously.

‘Yes,’ said Abdul, enjoying himself very much now, ‘you Christians may have plenty of sulphur and charcoal, but the very finest saltpetre is in Morocco, Syria, Egypt and Iraq. The lands of Islam! It is all ours, and yet Christendom cannot run without it! Truly we are blessed by Allah.’

‘Devil.’

‘I watch,’ said Abdul. ‘Others see but I observe. I wait, and I take my chance when it comes. I intend to die a very rich man.’

‘What’s the point of that?’ said Nicholas. ‘You can’t take it with you.’

Abdul smiled and tapped the side of his long thin nose. ‘I shall find a way. I shall negotiate with Azrael, the Angel of Death himself.’

‘He bloody well will too,’ said Hodge.

‘Observe now,’ said Abdul, ‘while we have been talking. The guns have been pulled back. I think Lala Mustafa is going to have a parade.’

‘A parade?’

He nodded. ‘To dishearten you. I overheard them discussing it, not forty-eight hours ago.’

And he was right.

The guns were rested after their brief opening barrage of ranging shots, and instead the great plain between the Ottoman encampment and the city walls began to fill with division after division of the Ottoman army on full dress parade.

‘Is this a siege or isn’t it?’ grumbled Smith.

‘Mental warfare,’ said Stanley. ‘Good tactics.’

At a safe distance of half a mile away was spread out what seemed like all the manpower of the Ottoman empire: Constantinople, Antioch, Damascus, Alexandria. . Those ancient, teeming cities of the East were inexhaustible.

A rumour was spreading along the city walls that the Mohammedan army numbered a quarter of a million. Another rumour said that Lala Mustafa had promised to make a pyramid of severed heads. Panic was spreading, the Turks were already winning.

‘We need to do something,’ said Smith.

Upon the plain, long trumpets blared, cannons fired blanks, pipes wailed and cymbals clashed. The great squares of Janizaries in their white silk robes and plumes of heron and ostrich feathers turned and wheeled in perfect order, to the audible shouts of their captains. There were holy men in green turbans carrying banners inscribed with the names of Allah in gold embroidery, horses champing and lavishly caparisoned, great goatskin drums beating out a slow stately march. The numbers of their besiegers were beyond telling.

And out in front of the vast parade rode a man in a midnight-blue robe on a white stallion, a drawn scimitar in his hand. Lala Mustafa.

Stanley pointed along the wall. ‘Bragadino’s having words with the gunnery team there, look.’

‘Guess what he’s planning.’

They went over, passing by a young Venetian arquebusier who was watching this intimidating display with eyes flared wide like those of a frightened horse. He was shaking so much, the barrel of his arquebus rattled on the top of the wall.

Stanley laid his big, heavy hand on the fellow’s arm and he shook a little less. ‘Watch this display of ours, son,’ he said. ‘It’ll put new mettle in you.’

A gunner was just ramming home a fist-sized iron ball when they came alongside.

‘Gentlemen,’ said Bragadino with a quick bow. ‘A reply was called for. Now,’ he said to the gunnery team. ‘Hit them.’

‘That’ll have to be a mighty good shot,’ said the gunnery sergeant.

‘Then make it a mighty good shot,’ snapped Bragadino.

Nicholas caught Stanley’s eye and they both smiled. Who did that remind them of? Grand Master Jean de la Valette, victor of Malta. To the very letter.

They quickly rolled the gun carriage forward into position, the muzzle at the niche. A gunner held the smoking linstock to the powder hole at the cannon’s breech.

‘Permission to fire too, sire?’ said Smith.

‘Knights of St John rarely take orders from any but their own,’ said Bragadino drily.

Then Smith was a blur of movement, astonishingly deft and precise. He slid the rod free from the long musket, cleaned the barrel, loaded it with paper cartridge and musket ball, and took position with eye along the barrel and finger on the trigger, all by the time the cannon near by roared out.

The gunnery sergeant had calculated both detonation and elevation finely. The iron ball arced high into the air, perfectly visible to both defenders and besiegers, watching in irritation the moment they heard the cannon. And then it began its descent towards the close-packed front ranks of the Sipahi cavalry.

It would just make it.

There was an unseemly sidestepping and barging of horses, wild shouting, a cavalry commander galloping down the lines in fury, before the iron ball smacked into the earth where moments before it would have killed both man and horse.

Out in front of his army, the figure in a midnight-blue robe on a white stallion pulled angrily around and glared at the walls of accursed Famagusta. And then, in violent lèse-majesté, a single musket shot rang out from the walls. Evidently a musket of incredible power and accuracy, for the expertly aimed ball kicked up dust not ten feet from his horse’s hooves. The horse reared; the rider remained in his saddle — but he dropped his scimitar.

He settled his horse. A moment’s ominous silence.

Smith rapidly reloaded.

‘Why bother?’ said Stanley. ‘You missed.’

Smith said, ‘You’d not have hit within a hundred yards of him.’

Even at this distance, Nicholas thought he could see the expression on Lala Mustafa’s face. As black as a burnt stubble field.

Then a slave ran out and retrieved the fallen scimitar and handed it back to the Pasha, head bowed.

Lala Mustafa looked down at the slave as if contemplating beheading him where he stood. Then he raised the scimitar high and bellowed out an order, voice like a lion’s roar.

‘In the name of God,’ said Stanley softly.

‘What?’ said Nicholas, palms sweating, scalp prickling ‘What is it?’

‘It’ll be bloody murder. He’s sending in the Bektasis already.’

They came racing across the dusty plain to paradise. Thousands of them, with not a square foot of armour between them. Naked but for turbans and loincloths, otherwise just bare skin and fanatic hearts. They clutched spears and daggers, and some had slashed themselves already in their zeal, blood coursing down their arms and legs, while others had battered their own foreheads with stones for the love of Allah.

What was Lala Mustafa thinking?

‘If he treats his own men like this,’ murmured Stanley, ‘think what he does to his enemies.’

‘All reserves to the walls!’ bellowed Bragadino. ‘Every second company to the west wall, volley fire on company command! Sergeant, ready the gunners below, linstocks at the ready. Grapeshot and chain-shot, close-quarter firing and no respite. If Mustafa wants to see what we’ve got, then let him see.’

‘That’s just what Lala Mustafa wants,’ said Stanley.

‘And the corpses of his Bektasis will start to fill up the moat as well, and sicken us with the smell. That’s what they are to him: sandbags that lay themselves down where needed.’

Stanley closed his eyes. Though they were savages and fanatics of the worst sort, yet he had an image of every screaming killer there as a boy once, smiled upon by his mother.

He started to ram the barrel of his arquebus.

Nicholas held his arquebus and trembled. Was it six years ago that he last faced such a horde? It felt long ago. He trembled like any novice, holding gun and rod, feeding it in. If Hodge had not been here, stolidly working away, if Stanley and Smith had not flanked him, he might have broken and run. But it was like a wild game of village football, he reminded himself. Like a long horse ride. You eased into it, the blood heated. In an hour or two the shakes would be gone and he’d be killing as well as any other.

The Bektasis came to the lip of the moat and Smith fired.

‘Now!’ he urged the company captains. ‘On the level!’

He was right. Once they were in the moat below it would be harder to shoot from directly above. The captains raised their arms, dropped them, and there was the deafening roll of hundreds of arquebuses in volley.

Nicholas pulled his own short arquebus back hard into his shoulder, sighted roughly, though there was little need, and pulled the trigger. The hard bark of the gun, the fierce recoil, the drift of smoke to the eyes. Impossible tell to where or even whether it had hit. But surely it had hit someone.

The moat filled with more and more attackers, hundreds jumping and slithering down the twenty-foot drop into the dry moat. Some twisted ankles, or worse, painless with opium. Some fell along with dead men, toppling into the moat with their hands clutched to chests or bellies.

And then the mines and grenades started to go off. It was atrocious, a spectacle of horror.

Nicholas saw men shredded into pieces even as they ran, saw a fountain of blood and limbs where another was blown high in the air. Others fell down clutching their feet in agony as they found the poisoned nails hammered into planks. They tried to stand and pull away, but were trampled down again by their screaming fellows.

Nicholas fired again at those opposite, waiting to drop into the moat. Impossible not to hit at this distance, with that close-packed mass of brown flesh.

He looked over the packed ranks of Bektasis, and thought he saw through the dust and heat haze and drifting smoke the figure of a man on a white horse, cold as a statue.

‘God damn you,’ he murmured, reloading again. Yes, the shakes were already subsiding. ‘Truly, God damn you and all your kind to hell. May the devil drink your blood as you have drunk men’s.’

The Bektasis had come on in such a wild rush that few even brought scaling ladders, and the few that did fumbled and struggled at the foot of the walls. They had come to die as much as to kill.

Nicholas leaned over, ready to seize one that thumped against the wall below and throw it back, but some infantrymen were ready with more efficient long grappling poles. Then Smith roared, ‘Down!’

They ducked back, for he had see the fizzing breech of a culverin in one of the side towers, and a moment later a hail of grapeshot sliced across the flank of the wall and blasted the men off the ladder. Then they reached down with the grappling poles and shoved the ladder clear.

More mines were going off in the moat all the time, more concealed grenades and pot-bombs and booby traps in pits. The bastions roared their enfilading fire and, from the walls above, soldiers tossed down more grenades, sacks of quicklime, incendiaries of that evil mix called Greek fire in glass jars. Made from a mix of rock-oil, turpentine and anything sugary — date wine, fig syrup, even honey — it burst into flames and clung to men’s flesh even as it burned. Men rolled in the moat in hoops of their own flames, howling like the damned, as others fought to get away. Sweet Cyprus honey was turned into a device of slaughter, and any comradeship was destroyed by mutual terror.

The assault of the Bektasis, so early in the siege and with so little damage done to the walls, was as Stanley predicted. Bloody murder.

Then the Bektasis suddenly broken and fled. They had had enough. Paradise could wait.

The smoke slowly cleared and the defenders peered out. The moat was a vision of hell, a ditch of perhaps a thousand stretched and writhing bodies, men and parts of men.

The defenders had sustained a single casualty. One novice had burned his hand firing up a pot-bomb.

‘There’ll be more to come,’ said Bragadino grimly. ‘Like the ranging shots of the cannon this morning, this was only a test, was it not? Now the moat is already half filled with the slain. And almost all our traps and grenades down there have been detonated.’

Then he held his sword aloft and cried, ‘A famous victory, my brothers!’ and a great and heartening cheer went round the walls.

Sometimes the best thing a commander could do was put new spirit in his men by lying.