Blood Red Sea

15

The Ottoman guns were being brought forward again.

This time it would not be a test. This time Lala Mustafa and his very finest gunnery masters would be aiming at the bases of the walls, towers, gates and bastions.

‘Keep your heads down,’ said Smith. ‘And wad your ears up or you’ll be deaf by sundown.’

The entire length of the west wall of Famagusta was under sustained assault from hurtling iron and stone. Nicholas had forgotten what it felt like to be under bombardment from two or three hundred cannon simultaneously. That is, his mind had not forgotten, but his body was shocked anew. His eardrums fluttered, his bones juddered, the air itself shook. The sound beat against him in blows and bludgeons.

And from within the city arose slow wails. The sickening thump of cannonball hitting walls and courtyards, fountains, chapels, churches, fine merchant houses and humble timber shacks. Infants screamed in their cradles, little girls buried their heads in their mothers’ skirts, still unable to shut out the terrible unceasing thunderstorm of the guns.

‘Return fire!’ cried Bragadino. ‘Hit their guns! Take them out one by one!’

But the Ottomans had such vastly superior manpower and resources, their slave gangs had already built for every gun a miniature earthen fortress. Still they must try.

‘Every day we hold out,’ said Stanley, ‘brings the Holy League one league nearer.’

Please God it was true.

Boys came round with pails and scoops of water, and they drank greedily. Others, called powder monkeys, came round with fresh powder and whatever smaller missiles they could carry. The gunners themselves brought up the bigger cannonballs. They returned fire as best they could. Smith kept trying with his jezail to take out a single gunner, even a gunnery master.

A church bell struck twelve noon.

And then three hundred black mouths of the enemy guns roared again and they all took cover.

‘Coming in!’

Most hit home with cruel accuracy, thumping into the base of the walls, sending up huge clouds of stone and mortar dust. The whole wall juddered.

A breathless messenger came running, saluting even as he ran, and gasped, ‘Big crack opened up beneath the Martinengo bastion, sire.’

‘Bag it up, man!’ cried Bragadino angrily. ‘We’re all out of mortar!’

A few balls went high and struck the sloping bastion tops, losing much of their power as they kicked up high above them, clearly visible.

‘One in the air!

Then everyone would watch and stumble out of the way as it came hurtling back down, on to tops or battlements, or falling within the city upon some house or tavern or shop roof, or thumping heavily into a sandy street or alley.

Boys came running out to see if they could pick it up.

‘Watch out!’ called Nicholas. ‘It’ll burn you!’

One boy squatted and touched the ball, half buried in the sand, with a wisp of dried grass. It smoked. He stared up at Nicholas wide eyed.

Sometimes a fired cannonball was hot and sometimes merely warm, without obvious reason. Later the boys would retrieve the balls in coarse slings and carry them back up to the walls to be used in return. Soldiers would scratch messages on them with their knives.

‘Eat this, Mehmet.’

‘Up your Mohammedan arse.’

‘This one’s for the Prophet.’

Then again, some of those coming in from the Ottoman guns had the Lion of Venice stamped on them. Taken from Nicosia, and garlanded with similar greetings.

Stanley knelt and peered, and then said, ‘These fellows can’t even spell turd. Disgraceful.’

‘Coming in!’

And from the Martinengo bastion came a terrible sound. A multiple strike from three or four huge cannon, the ones they called basilisks — and another sound beneath it.

A deep, groaning judder: the sound of a wall giving way. The air filled with a cloud of ochre dust, far greater than any yet, blinding them all. And through the cloud of dust, from the Ottoman lines, a huge cheer.

Bragadino cried, ‘Smith, Stanley, take your men! I’ll send Baglione’s own company too, one of the best. Hold them back at the bastion, report to me what damage.’

They ran.

Across the plain, two huge columns of Janizaries were already racing towards the stricken bastion.

Even as they ran, another monstrous volley of cannon fire juddered through the air. A big gun needed resting and cooling for as much as half an hour after firing. Lala Mustafa must have such vast numbers of artillery pieces that he could fire rolling volley after volley, resting them in turn. There would be no respite, all day and all night. The Ottoman Empire was determined that Cyprus should not prove another Malta. And so far, everything was going as planned.

There were Venetian infantrymen streaming away from the Martinengo bastion, some covered in white plaster dust like ghosts.

‘Back to your positions!’ Smith bellowed at them. ‘Where are you going?’

One barged past him. ‘Who the fuck are you?’

A giant fist struck him down senseless.

‘That’ll really help,’ said Stanley.

The others clustered uncertainly, staring at this burly, terrifying-looking Knight of St John with his blazing black eyes.

Then the company commander, Astorre Baglione, came at the trot with his hundred-strong hand-picked company, the finest reserve troops in Famagusta. He barked orders even as he trotted, puffing with the effort for he was short and stoutly built.

‘Fall in, you sons of bitches! Martinengo’s not done yet! And it’ll be a whole lot worse for you if the Turk breaks in! Now move your lazy arses!’

Buoyed up by the fresh troops, the soldiers from the Martinengo bastion turned and lumbered back the way they had come.

The fellow at Smith’s feet stirred and groaned.

‘Lie there,’ said Smith. ‘Sun yourself a while.’

Then there was a cruel whirring sound in the air, and they all ducked down, heads low, in the shadow of a wall.

But not a powder-boy, a leather satchel of black gunpowder over his shoulder, staring open mouthed into the blue air. No more than six or seven.

‘Get down!’ screamed Nicholas, and made to run to him.

Then the missile struck. It was marble, specifically intended to shatter on impact, and send shards of sharp white stone flying in all directions. It struck the top of a wall, exploded, and the boy went down.

Nicholas raced to him and pulled him over on his back. His smooth young face was stuck with lean white splinters, and he was screaming.

Then Stanley was kneeling beside him too. ‘You go on!’ he shouted to the others. ‘We’ll join you!’

He raised the boy’s head from the dust, fingers in his hair. There were more splinters in his skull, but he didn’t find what he dreaded. A split in the skull, or a shard as long as a man’s finger, embedded straight down.

The boy screamed and screamed; it was no good telling one so young not to. He had a right to scream. With astonishing concentration and gentleness, kneeling there in the dusty street with cannonballs flying and falling beyond them in the heart of the city, and the sound of many people running, shouting, a ruinous pandemonium, Stanley’s powerful fingers moved with the delicacy of a lacemaker’s. He plucked the shards from the boy’s cheeks, forehead, one from his neck, one from just above his lip, and several from his skull beneath his child-fine hair. Numerous little trails of blood ran down the boy’s face, trickling into the corners of his mouth, and Stanley wiped them away with his neckerchief.

At last he was satisfied and stood and raised the boy up in his arms.

‘I’ll take him,’ said Nicholas. ‘You go and fight.’

Stanley considered briefly, then nodded and passed him the sobbing child. ‘Not over your shoulder. Keep his head up or he’ll only bleed the more. Find the Franciscan friars if you can. Though they’ll be busy.’

‘Will I die? Will I die?’ wailed the little boy as Nicholas hurried as best he could through the streets, almost blinded with the dust, ducking into doorways every time he heard another whine, another thump.

‘You won’t die,’ said Nicholas. ‘I won’t let you.’

‘It hurts! Why does it hurt so much?’

One of those questions no man could answer. He hurried on, arms already aching with the sobbing burden.

He came into a small square — a dead mule, a shattered bell tower, a hubbub of people. Then through the dust clouds he saw a familiar shape in a black dress. She saw him and came towards him.

‘You’re limping,’ he said.

‘It’s nothing,’ she said swiftly. ‘Just my age.’

He glanced down. Beneath her dress he could see that one of her bare feet was bloody and bandaged.

‘Let me take him. You are needed on the walls.’

He passed her the boy, and she kissed away the bloody trickles on his forehead. ‘There, my lamb, my pet. Tell me your name.’

His sobbing diminished a little at this warm maternal touch, the rich smell of her dark hair. He stuttered, ‘Andreas.’

‘Come then, Andreas, we will find your mama and make you better.’

‘My mama fell down in the street this morning.’

She exchanged an agonised look with Nicholas.

‘Men in black robes took her away,’ the boy said, starting to sob again.

Sweet Jesus.

‘Maybe the Dominicans,’ said Nicholas, ‘they’ve been caring for the wounded too.’

‘I’ll try.’ She was already going.

‘What is your name?’ he called after her.

‘Evangelina.’

And she was gone.

He ran back to the Martinengo bastion. The sound of grim tumult and steel on steel came to his ears.

He prayed as he ran. For the little boy, for his mother. For the widow Evangelina.

For the whole damn city.

The little boy’s pain, and the running, sweat coursing down his forehead from under the tight-fitting morion, and the unreal sights of a city being pulverised yet still refusing to surrender — the chaos and cruelty of it all, too great to be reduced to words — all of it filled him with the familiar old battle fury that seemed to slow everything down around him. As he ran into the mêlée, he saw ahead of him that the great south-west Martinengo bastion was already half in ruins. A gaping wound opened straight out on to the plain where the south wall had stood, and yet above, a huge, half-broken arch still hung overhead, apparently supported by thin air, threatening to crash down upon them at any moment and bury them in a hundred tons of Cyprus sandstone.

All of them. Venetians and Spaniards and Ottomans alike.

For the Janizaries were upon them.

The wall had collapsed into a massive ramp of rubble and broken stonework, steep sided and some thirty feet high, and two groups of men were bitterly contesting this piece of worthless ruin. The ramp was hemmed in between those walls still standing, forming a front no more than fifty yards wide. Yet beyond, many more Janizaries pressed forward, rank upon rank. If they could only break in here, form a bridgehead of this one bastion and throw open the gates — the city could be overrun by thousands of enemy troops in minutes.

And they were nearly in already.

Nicholas clawed his way up the rubble ramp with drawn sword just as an Ottoman order rang out and all the Janizaries fell back and crouched.

‘Down!’ yelled Baglione, but many of the inexperienced pikemen were too late. Over the heads of their crouching front rank, the rear rank of Janizary musketeers fired a perfectly timed volley from less than twenty yards away.

Two of their own were hit by musket balls that spun erratically from the barrel — it was a dangerous tactic — but the rest of the volley raked into the stumbling line of defenders, taking down as many as twenty or thirty still standing. One fell backwards on top of Nicholas. He dragged himself out from underneath the dead weight, sheathed his sword and snatched up the man’s pike.

‘Attack!’ roared a familiar voice. It was Smith.

Maximum aggression, surprise, ferocity at every moment. Especially the least expected moment. That was the secret of the knights’ fearsome reputation.

Now desperate, exposed, a key bastion already half blown away, defenders outnumbered ten or twenty to one, and their attackers without question the finest infantrymen in all of Christendom or Asia, Smith was leading his comrades in a sudden assault, scrambling down the ramp and into the startled enemy ranks.

Below them, the crouching Janizary front rank were just getting to their feet once more and reordering the line, when several fire-breathing and heavily armoured men crashed into them: Smith and Stanley, Mazzinghi and Giustiniani, drawing with them the bolder of Baglione’s own pikemen. Mazzinghi was momentarily reduced to using nothing but a bare wooden pikestaff for a weapon, his sword having just snapped off at the hilt in an enemy shield. But he managed to avoid a panicked blow from a kneeling Janizary, knock him senseless and then fight on with the fellow’s own scimitar. Smith himself swung a glaive, a grim, short-handled pike, having abandoned his sword as far too delicate for this bludgeoning close-quarter butchery. He opened a man’s belly, cut away another’s hand and half severed the head of a third in three swift slashes.

Nicholas ran up to join them, slipped and stumbled on something. Glanced down. A hand, diagonally severed at the wrist. The sole of his boot smeared with its blood. He pressed forward, swerved and kicked down a sword-thrust with his boot, kicked his assailant again in the face, and then killed him with a clean thrust to the heart.

The Janizaries fell back, rolled, tripped, stumbled into their own second rank, and were impaled by blade upon blade. It was a classic case of their superior numbers, in a confined space, telling against them. Behind them, their own line of musketeers was panicking, trying to reload.

Smith saw a bugler raise his bugle to his lips, rushed him, slapped the bugle aside and knocked the fellow senseless with a titanic blow of his gauntleted fist.

‘It’s called cutting the lines of communication!’ he called to Stanley near by, stomping the bugle flat in the dust.

Lala Mustafa sat his white horse.

‘What is delaying them? Why are they not in yet?’

‘Some sort of counter-attack, esteemed Pasha.’

‘Counter-attack,’ snorted Lala Mustafa, flicking a fly away with his crop. ‘Send in another regiment.’

A scimitar swept inches in front of Nicholas’s stomach. He sucked in, raised his arms, for all the world like a Spanish matador, and then drove the point of his sword in a thrust straight enough to please a French fencing master. He impaled the fellow’s left shoulder, pulled swiftly back. The fellow, burly with a hennaed beard, came at him again, not even feeling for the wound. Then a crossbow sang and the bolt went into his stomach below his belt, and he doubled up and knelt. Nicholas finished him with a second straight thrust.

He glanced back.

Crossbowmen were swarming up the broken walls of the bastion behind like Barbary apes, some with their bows clutched under their arms as they climbed. They crouched where they could, trying not to slip and fall, and loosed off steel bolts into the oncoming Janizaries as fast as possible. Even so awkwardly positioned, cranking back the powerful crossbow arm while struggling for balance, they could achieve a much faster rate of fire than any musketeer could manage.

Baglione’s order. Good thinking.

Baglione himself, meanwhile, had taken thirty hand-picked men and come out of a small sally port on the west wall to savage the flank of the Janizary attack before they even knew what hit them.

‘Imagine you are cavalry!’ he shouted. ‘Hit them and run back! Do not get caught up!’

They followed orders with perfect discipline, emerging from the sally port at a sprint, racing round to attack the startled Janizary flank, loosing arquebuses, pistols and crossbows into them, killing or downing as many as twenty of the enemy in an instant, and then sprinting back again through the sally port and heaving it shut, barred and bulked before the Janizary captain even knew what had happened.

The assault was weakening.

Smith and Stanley pressed on, hacking and swiping, closely followed by the rest of Baglione’s elite company, and more Venetian pikemen. They emerged on to the open plain before the front line of Janizary musketeers, still reloading, eyes flaring wide.

The damned Christians! It was a counter-attack, a sortie. In broad daylight! And so hugely outnumbered. But the Janizaries had shamefully lost their battle order for a moment. They were unprepared.

An instant later they were reduced to using their unloaded muskets as clubs to fend off a furious frontal assault of flailing swords and pikes. Out on the Janizary right a pack of crossbowmen in studded black leather jerkins had run at the crouch, knelt and were firing into their other flank. Devils and djinns, where were the Sipahis when you needed them?

Here they came. Red plumes and lances, glinting helmets, the thunder of galloping hooves in the dust, thirsting for the shame to be avenged.

They were expected.

‘Fall back!’ cried Baglione. ‘At the double. Crossbowmen, one more volley at their horses and then the sally port!’

Then they were clawing their way back over the rubble ramp and falling down within the shadow of the broken bastion, utterly exhausted. Behind them they heard the stricken whinnies of horses as crossbow bolts thumped into rumps and flanks, and red-plumed Sipahis tumbled and rolled with their wounded mounts.

Fifty fresh men stepped between the defenders up the ramp, arquebuses already smouldering. Another fine order of Baglione’s. They shouldered arms and waited, the matchcords sending a thin drift of smoke into their eyes. And then the Janizaries were reforming and coming back, a thousand strong, with two entire companies of light archers to give extra fire. The arquebuses roared out.

Some damage. Some sop to morale. But never enough.

The defenders had also lost men, with far fewer to lose. They were cut and bruised and weary, eyes blinded with sweat, sword-arms shaking and burning. And there were no reserves to take their place.

Against the length of the west wall, and especially Martinengo’s twin bastion on the north-west corner, the monstrous Ottoman guns kept up a constant battering.

Something clanged on Nicholas’s helmet. A musket ball? What did it feel like to be shot in the head? A slow, oozy blurring? But no, it was just a small fragment of stone falling from above. He looked up. That huge half-broken arch overhead, suspended by nothing but habit.

‘Here, boy!’ Baglione was beside him, plucking a grenade from his belt. ‘You’re still young enough to climb trees. Get up there. And for God’s sake remember to shout a signal when you fire it up!’

Nicholas stared at him bewildered, clutching the pottery grenade to his chest, the roar of the Janizaries coming ever closer. They were no more than two hundred yards off now, coming at the trot.

Down among the wounded, a man screamed a high, crazed scream and then was suddenly silenced.

His head spun.

‘There, boy, there!’ shouted Baglione, thumping him hard on the back. ‘Climb! Lodge it there, look, where the plaster is streaming from that crack!’

Then he understood.

Baglione thrust a squat wheel-lock pistol into his belt.

He took a deep breath and closed off his senses to the world around him and forgot any fear. All men must die. Perhaps it will be now. But Christ, let me die and not be maimed. Then he froze out even that thought. There was just him and this arching wall.

He kicked off his boots and climbed barefoot. He caught a stream of plaster and rubbed it in his hands for more grip. He moved slowly and steadily upwards, never looking down. But from below he heard the first ring of steel on steel as it began again. Shut it out. Nothing but him and the wall.

Now he came to a jutting pillar top and for a moment had to reach up and hang suspended by his fingers alone. Something smacked into the wall beside him, a puff of dust. Musket ball or crossbow bolt? Ignore it. He swung a foot up and pulled himself over the lip of the cornice. There was no decent handhold here, the arch above was smooth stone, but there was a vertical crevice where he could jam his hand and then cramp it into a fist. It would have to be enough.

His foot slipped, he cramped his fist harder and his arm was wrenched so painfully he cried out. He scrabbled with his bare right foot and found a tiny hold with his curled toes. His foot began to burn and ache immediately as it took almost all his body weight. Then he pulled the grenade from his belt and forced it into the crack. Plaster coursed down. Beyond him stretched the huge arch that had formed the vault of the bastion. Impossible that it still hung there in empty space. But it seemed miraculously sturdy still. This mere pot-bomb would do nothing. Yet he must try.

He pulled the squat pistol from his belt and reached after the lodged grenade. His other arm burned as if aflame with Greek fire to the bone. The matchcord was well soaked in volatile oil. All he needed was a spark and the fuse would start to fizz. A fuse less than an inch long. Only a few seconds of burn time.

He pulled the trigger and the little wheel spun. Nothing. He fired again. His arm trembled, hot to the core; his foot was about to go and he would fall. He wondered if he should let himself surrender to it. He would land in a mess of men and steel blades. O Christ let me not be maimed.

He could not fire the pistol again, he hadn’t the strength. He was going. This one, he prayed. He demanded of God. This one.

The wheel whirred and sparks flew off in a bright little roundel like a tiny Catherine wheel. The oil-sodden fuse began to smoulder and then smoked. Very fast indeed.

He dropped the pistol down his shirt front. Pulled himself painfully upright with both arms and shouted down below, ‘She’s going!’

No one heard.

The fuse was half burned already. Not just smouldering but burning, a spitting white flare.

‘She’s going!’

Then Stanley’s broad, ruddy face looking up, an arm signal, and suddenly the defenders dropped back. The Janizaries roared and pushed forward.

He must climb down. But he could not. He was trapped.

Deaf, blind, crippled, buried alive.

His foot slipped and he hung by his hands alone. He would die here. He could not move any further. His heart burned, his tongue stuck to his mouth, every muscle, every tendon, burned with a red fire.

He buried his head between his arms, scrabbled with his feet. Nothing. Not a hold. He could smell the burning matchcord, the oily smoke mocked him. His fingers were slipping from the stone ledge. He tried to cover his ears with his upper arms even as he hung there.

And then the grenade went off.