Blood Red Sea

16

Like any great building, like a great beast brought down by a hunter’s spear, the arch seemed to fall slowly, hesitantly. It broke away from the wall where the grenade had blown and gave a half-turn in the air as it came down, blocks the size of boulders. And then the Janizary front line was crushed and buried, and the rest fell back aghast.

His eyelids fluttered.

Stanley was below, his arms outstretched. ‘Fall, boy! Let gol!’

Something was dripping from his right leg. Coursing down. His foot had gone.

He closed his fluttering eyelids and fell.

‘To the hospital with him!’

The lower slopes of the ramp were covered with the slain, Christian and Muslim commingled. Cloven helmets, broken spears, dead men, white silk robes wet and stained red. An arquebus that had exploded on firing, its muzzle a shredded steel flower.

‘Back off the ramp!’ cried Baglione, perspiring, pale. ‘Sandbags coming up. Time to get building.’

Bragadino meanwhile ordered every spare gun and arquebus on to the walls beside Martinengo to give covering fire while they worked. The more Janizaries Lala Mustafa sent in at this point, the more would be killed.

‘We need to fill this bastion up and pack it tight,’ said Baglione. He looked uncharacteristically anxious.

‘Aye,’ said Stanley. ‘They’re coming round.’

It was true. Well out of range, the Turks were bringing a whole column of guns on their carriages round to the south. Within hours they would be freshly earthed up and ready to fire. Just as night fell.

‘We can take it,’ said Baglione. ‘You know from Malta — you are of the Order of St John, are you not?’

‘Knight Grand Cross Edward Stanley.’

Baglione nodded. ‘Happy you are here. You know from Malta, nothing stops a cannonball like a few yards of earth.’

But Smith was glaring around, up, down, eyeing every man that walked wearily past him with ferocious suspicion.

Stanley murmured, ‘Less obvious, please, Brother.’

Smith kept his voice lowered, with great effort. ‘I am thinking, there is no way a few volleys of cannon, not even those two-hundred-pounder basilisks of the Turks, could have brought down these walls so easily.’

Stanley’s expression was grim. ‘But they could not have mined this far either. Not so soon.’

‘Yet there were mines under this tower.’ Smith’s expression was as dark as a storm at sea. ‘We have traitors among us.’

Baglione gasped. Stanley looked at him; the man was paler than ever, his arms clutched tight over his belly. Then he realised. It was not fear. It was agony. Baglione was hit.

‘Sir, you must retire.’

‘I cannot. No one else. .’

Then he fell against him. Blood leaked from beneath his breastplate.

Stanley held him with his strong right arm. ‘Stretcher!’

‘Remember it was just on noon that the Turkish guns opened up!’ said Smith as he and Stanley ran. ‘When our own church bells rang. It was co-ordinated. Someone lit a fuse underground, and the whole thing blew.’

Shouted messages were passing along the wide wall above.

‘Tell us the news!’ shouted Smith.

A pikeman looked down. ‘Fort Andruzzi bastion! The Turks are bringing guns round north as well!’

‘Tell the Governor to find us there! Urgent!’

They ran faster.

Malta was a rock, but Famagusta was built on sand. It took little to tunnel beneath.

They came to the north-west corner of the city and a familiar figure emerged from a small house near by. Abdul of Tripoli.

Smith seized him by the collar of his robe. ‘Talk, Moor. This is where you are living?’

Abdul put his finger to his lips and said very quietly, glancing back over his shoulder, ‘There are buckets inside.’

‘What?’

‘More buckets than you would expect in an ordinary household. And a pile of earth in the fireplace, which seems curious, does-’

Smith tossed Abdul aside like a discarded cloak and hurtled inside. Stanley steadied him and kept his hand heavy on his shoulder.

‘You still think I betray you, Christian? After all we have been through.’

‘I advise you to be silent a while.’

The Moor stood placidly with his hands folded before him.

‘Show me your hands.’

Abdul did so.

Not a spot of earth on them, fingernails as clean as a queen’s.

‘What were you doing in this house?’

‘I thought you told me to be silent.’

Stanley gave him a gentle shake, which made Abdul’s head loll like a puppet’s. ‘I am kinder than my Brother John,’ he said, ‘but not that kind.’

‘Very well, very well. I keep my ear to the ground. I observe. I trade in fine garments, in jewels, in muskets, but most precious of all, information. The moment that south-west bastion went down, I started looking about me. It just took you a little longer to work it out.’ He shrugged. ‘Had I been Governor Bragadino, I would have ordered every house within fifty yards of the walls to be razed to the ground before the siege even started.’

Stanley felt his jaw tighten. The Moor was right, damn him.

In a city as mixed and polyglot as Famagusta, there were always traitors.

Smith hauled two men out howling, apparently by the hair, and dropped them like sacks in the dust. From their bruised and bloody faces, it looked as if he had banged their heads together like bowling balls quite a bit already.

‘One Bohemian, one of the Kingdom of Serbia, I think. Look at their fingernails.’

Stanley trod on their hands. ‘How much are they paying you?’

One howled. The other jabbered.

‘In Italian, or some cultivated tongue at least.’

One said, ‘Our freedom only! No gold, no silver, just our lives at the end of it.’

‘Fools as well as traitors,’ said Smith. ‘You really think Lala Mustafa would trouble to find you and save you if this city falls?’

The man sobbed. Smith drew his sword and touched the edge to his neck.

Bragadino came cantering down the street on horseback with two lancers.

‘Is there any more to learn? You two vermin, are there any more saboteurs among us?’

The man wept and shook his head. ‘I do not know.’

‘Understand this,’ said Bragadino. ‘You are to die before nightfall. Think carefully and tell me all you know. Soon you will be before the Throne of Judgement.’

He controlled his sobbing and said softly, ‘There are no others I know of, I swear it.’

‘You mined the Martinengo bastion? Just the two of you?’

‘Impossible,’ said Smith.

‘We stored powder in the crypt of the church of St John Chrysostomos. It was not so far to dig, and there was an ancient culvert too. It was not the best mining, but with the cannon fire as well it was enough.’

‘You have been the death of many good Christians,’ said Bragadino. ‘You should fear what is to come.’

‘I fear it,’ the man said, trembling. ‘Sweet Jesus, I do fear it.’

‘They have no more to tell,’ said Bragadino. ‘Imminent death often makes a man truthful.’

Smith and Stanley nodded their agreement.

Bragadino relieved the knights themselves of the squalid task, and ordered his men to dismount and draw their swords.

The traitors’ heads were struck off in the street before a watching crowd, and their bodies thrown over the walls.

Bragadino looked grave. ‘It was my error,’ he said, ‘a gross error.’

‘May we ask why the houses were not razed before?’

‘To appease the damned merchants. They demanded not a building should be touched. Now they are overruled.’

Every house, every stable, every donkey shack within fifty yards of the walls was pulled down and razed that night, the material carried to the walls for precious bulking. Some of it was used to refill the tunnel they found under the traitors’ house, a foul damp burrow badly propped and leaking sand. A poor thing, but stretching underneath the walls of Fort Andruzzi, in concert with a heavy barrage from beyond, it might have played a crucial part.

Even a fine acacia tree was cut down, along with two merchant houses with splendid courtyards and upper galleries, an ancient Byzantine chapel, first hurriedly deconsecrated by a priest. He carried away the icons by torchlight, his face wet with tears.

Groups of merchants in fine robes and gowns looked on, muttering among themselves.

Nicholas awoke with a Franciscan friar bending over his leg and bathing it.

‘My foot has gone,’ he mumbled. ‘Blown away. I am lamed for life.’

The friar looked up. He was slightly hunchbacked, with a snub nose, and amazingly bushy grey eyebrows which curved up at the ends, making him look like a comical demon.

‘Both feet still present,’ he said, ‘though one a little cut about and worse for wear. Brain soused in opium, though. I’d sleep if I were you.’

It was dark when a visitor came. Stanley himself.

‘I brought you an orange.’

Nicholas turned his head on the pillow. ‘Opium.’

‘You’ve had enough to fly to the moon and back.’

The knight squeezed the fruit to a pulp in his bare fist and the juice poured into a silver goblet.

‘Show-off,’ murmured Nicholas.

Stanley grinned. His hands were black with powder and burns, and his knuckles grazed and bleeding.

‘I don’t mind the gunpowder so much,’ said Nicholas, ‘but I’d rather not taste your blood.’

‘It’ll be good for you. The blood of English earls runs in these veins.’

He held up the boy’s head and put the goblet to his lips. The juice was sharp and sweet and delicious.

He lay back. ‘More.’

‘I’ll bring more.’

If I can find more, he thought. The city was already feeling its isolation, cut off from the surrounding countryside and no ships coming or going in the harbour. And the Ottoman guns had already destroyed two grain stores.

‘What happened at the bastion?’ asked Nicholas.

Stanley set down the goblet. ‘Your heroic little endeavour did some good. The arch came down, a few enemy were killed, just when we were hard pressed. Baglione was hurt in the fighting, though.’

‘Badly?’

A second’s hesitation. ‘He will mend, I’m sure. The Turks pulled back disheartened. Though I know you are strong enough to want the truth, and not heroical bombast. What really saved us, while we hacked and bludgeoned away there, was the work of Bragadino in the city. The moment the Janizaries gave us respite, we looked around and there were — I do not exaggerate — a thousand, two thousand, of the townsfolk in perfect columns, bearing sandbags, earth sacks, pushing barrows. They filed in one by one and filed out again, obedient as nuns. Bragadino supervising. Each one left and then came back and rejoined the queue with another sack. Cushions full of stones and sawdust. Pillowcases stuffed with straw. Anything.

‘The people worked the rest of the day, in rotation. Perhaps one in every ten citizens was there, helping bulk up the broken Martinengo bastion. The work will go on all night, and by dawn that shattered wall will not matter so much any more. For Martinengo will just be a great, squat, solid block of. . stuff. We can’t use it any more, alas. But neither can the Turk take it. And it was this — the citizens and peasants and humble sacks of sand — that have really saved us for now.’

Nicholas said, ‘I am glad of it. Hanging there from my fingertips, I felt no hero. I felt like a Bedlam fool.’

Stanley grinned. ‘I’ll get you some more oranges.’

Outside, he paused for a while. Yes, he had told Ingoldsby the truth. It was an insult not to. But not the whole truth.

Not the dismal rumour that more and more of the town’s citizens, especially the wealthier and more influential of them, were talking about negotiated surrender.

The sturdy peasants and plain townsfolk would have none of it. They lived with death every day, and hated the Turk more than anything. But the wealthy merchants, many of them Venetian or Levantine, said they had no quarrel with the Sultan Selim. What matter who governed, as long as they could continue their trade in peace? And they wept to see their fine city houses and courtyards reduced to rubble and dust. Their wives harangued them further.

‘Surely,’ they said, ‘some accommodation can be made?’

Oh for a city full of Malta peasants, thought Stanley. They were a people made of rock.

There was one other strange turn that day. An Ottoman ball had gone into the house where the fifty Muslim pilgrims of the haj were sheltering, and it killed two of them. Some time later, the leader of the group came to Bragadino, and pleaded to be released.

‘Released? In the middle of a siege? Released where, man?’

Then he told their story. They were Muslim converts, from Wallachia. Only two generations ago, their families had still been Christian. But they were so oppressed and impoverished by the relentless taxes and punishments of their Muslim overlords that eventually, ‘God forgive us, we abjured the Cross and bowed to Mecca. As so many have done before us.’ And before the Governor’s astonished eyes, he crossed himself.

Bragadino decided to trust them. In a few days’ time, he promised them, under cover of darkness, they would file silently aboard a galley in the harbour under the command of Romegas himself, slip past the Turkish patrols, and sail into the west.

Night time. Torchlight and cooking fires, dogs barking, muted talk. Eating and drinking, grimy faces, bowls and goblets slurped and guzzled. Water still plentiful, drunk by the quart.

No news from the lookouts on the walls, no sign of activity around the Turkish guns.

Suffering Christ, they might even get some sleep.

Two soldiers rigged up a pipe and pumped from a cistern, a cool gout of water at head height. Exhausted and filthy soldiers stripped and stood naked beneath it.

Women passing by screamed and giggled, half hid their faces with their headscarves and turned the other way. But not before having a swift look.

One well-built handsome Spaniard, muscular chest coursing cold water, scooped back his thick black hair, shook his beard and grinned at the women and called out, ‘I am glad we give you something to smile about, fair ladies, in these straitened times!’

They passed on with heads lowered, giggling like schoolgirls. More than one of them would dream of him tonight.

Priests of the Greek Church, Armenians, Dominicans and Franciscans, friars and nuns, said nothing to condemn such bawdiness, or the scenes they saw in taverns, stables, back alleys. In extremis, men and women would take what comfort they could.

They forgot their doctrinal differences and worked on through the long hot night.

They tended the wounded, drugged the dying, and buried the dead.