The Great Siege

17

They had only just scrambled aboard and were discussing urgently with the master when a deep, powerful voice roared from the high quayside behind them, ‘So this is the leaking bucket going to Malta! I might have known only a gang of sunstruck Englishmen would sail on such a ship of fools!’

‘I know that voice.’ Stanley shielded his eyes and looked up, a broad grin spreading over his ruddy features. ‘The Chevalier de Guaras. Fra Melchior! Do you seek permission to come aboard?’

The burly bearded figure swung himself down the iron ladder in the stone harbour wall. ‘I need no permission!’

‘Oi!’ called the master. ‘No strangers come aboard my ship without my word!’

Smith silenced him with payment. Stanley and the knight called Melchior de Guaras embraced.

‘Brother, you look older,’ said Stanley.

‘And you look fatter. How are you planning to slay the Turk, suffocate him with your belly?’

‘Ah, Fra Melchior, surely the greatest wit this side of Toledo! How near is the Army of Islam?’

De Guaras said, ‘Beacon fires from Calabria tell that they have passed by. We may have three days, no more.’

Stanley beckoned. ‘Master Ingoldsby, Master Hodgkin — I give you the Chevalier de Guaras, Knight Grand Cross. Our brother-in-arms.’

The Spanish knight shook their hands, eyeing them keenly. ‘Your squires?’

‘I am no man’s squire,’ said Nicholas quietly. ‘I am a gentleman volunteer, and this is my comrade, Hodge.’

De Guaras’s eyes twinkled. ‘I am honoured. You come at a good time. All are welcome upon Malta. Even Englishmen.’

Hodge seemed about to say something, so Stanley asked who else might need passage.

‘I will return,’ said the Spaniard. ‘There are more of us. Though never enough.’

Never enough indeed. The crowned heads of Europe sent no aid. Of all the ships in Sicily’s busiest port, the Swan was the only one heading south. All others were keeping well clear, sailing along the coast for Palermo, or north for Italy. The port of Siracusa was almost dead, the Malta Channel empty of shipping. All had heard the news, and it was mere folly to sail into a coming storm.

A few minutes later De Guaras returned with some crates on a cart, and two companions. Fra Adrien, the Chevalier de la Rivière, a knight of the French langue, an elegantly attired and soft-voiced fellow, whom Stanley whispered to Nicholas was as fine a swordsman as he would ever see. And with him a young novice of the Order, a Portuguese lad called Bartolomeo Faraone, no older than Nicholas.

Smith considered him. ‘And of the Holy Father’s proclamation that no beardless boys should fight, for the sake of Christian mercy?’

‘I am no beardless boy,’ said Faraone, rubbing the backs of his hands over his cheeks. ‘Perhaps your eyes are weak after a long voyage at sea.’

‘Does your mother know you are here?’

‘Peace, Fra John,’ said De la Rivière, smiling. ‘He is an earnest and devout novice, no younger than your — gentleman volunteers here. And besides,’ his smile faded, ‘every man is needed.’

‘How many are the Order now at San Angelo?’

De la Rivière hesitated. ‘The last I heard … four hundred or so.’

‘Four hundred?’ said Smith.

‘Four hundred of the finest in Christendom,’ said Stanley.

‘Pray that it prove so,’ said De la Rivière.

There came one last passenger for Malta, a youth who seemed to be travelling alone. He stood and swayed on the quayside just as they were loosening the ropes and preparing to move off.

‘Another for Malta! Hold there!’ he cried weakly.

Smith muttered, ‘Puppies in a sack, is he drunk?’

‘Or badly fevered,’ said Stanley.

The youth on the quayside was indeed an extraordinary sight. Very tall and lean, his face was long, thin and pale, adorned with a moustache like a bootlace stuck to his upper lip. He wore an extraordinary confusion of swords and daggers, none of the newest, and a much-dented breastplate in the ancient style with a huge crest in the centre, badly tarnished. He stood and swayed, eyes unfocused and brow sweating profusely in a manner suggesting extreme ill-health.

‘You’ll bring no fever on board my ship!’ said the master bluntly. ‘Now back off, we’re full.’

‘’Tis no fever,’ protested the youth, ‘except it be the furor martialis, the fever of chivalry and noble war.’ He clutched his stomach.

Smith said, ‘Stand back, I think he’s about to spew.’

There was an anxious moment, and then the youth regained his composure.

‘Your name, sir?’

He bowed very slowly. ‘My name is Don Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, from the demesne of the Alcalá de Henares, in Old Castile. My father is the universally renowned Rodrigo de Cervantes, knight at arms and sometime apothecary-surgeon, in reduced cirmcumstances. Through him I claim descent from the ancient kings of Castile, from Alfonso and Pedro, as well as Eleanor of Navarre, and ultimately from the Visigothic Kings themselves, Rodrigo being the name of-’

‘Spellbinding stuff,’ said Smith, ‘but we are in some haste. Your ancestry later, perhaps? We sail to war.’

‘Yes, well, quite,’ said the young man. ‘Now if you would just hold your craft still a while, I shall fetch my pack …’

He turned away unsteadily.

‘Sail!’ called Smith.

They were some paces off the quayside when the tall, starveling figure of Don Miguel appeared once more, carrying a small pack and, for reasons unclear, leading a donkey.

‘What ho!’ he cried. ‘For Malta, for our Saviour and Saint James! I say, what ho there! I require passage!’

And to their astonishment he began to descend the iron rungs straight down into the water, sack on his back, the donkey staring gloomily down at his master as if he had seen it all before. People gathered around, laughing down at the fevered madman. It was good entertainment.

‘Hold there,’ cried the young knight errant. ‘I shall swim out to you!’

‘The breastplate alone will drown him,’ muttered Smith. ‘What’s the addlepate fool thinking of?’

‘He’s brain-fevered,’ said Stanley. Then he shouted to the bystanders, ‘Grab a hold of the puppy and bring him back! He’ll souse himself!’

At that moment the youth slipped from the bottom rung into the water and immediately vanished beneath the surface, until a stout mariner swung a boathook down and collared him by the leather strap of his breastplate. Another climbed down the ladder to help, and he was hauled up like a sickly eel.

The moment he could speak again, the fellow was calling out across the water about the Moors, and King Boabdil, and the Reconquista; about El Cid, and the Lady Aramintha, whose love tokens he wore about his person, sewn to his breast, and whose unearthly beauty he could scarce-

Then he lost consciousness, and was laid none too gently upon the quayside like a dead fish.

‘Brain-fevered, truly,’ said Smith.

‘A fellow of rare imagination,’ said Stanley.

‘Come,’ said De la Rivière. ‘To Malta.’

Smith tossed Nicholas an arquebus sidelong.

‘Here,’ he said, ‘show me how you’d load it.’

Nicholas was unfamiliar with the weapon, but he followed what he knew of loading a fowling-piece, and the twenty-one steps needed to ready a gun. Aware of the eyes of Smith and Stanley and the other knights keenly upon him, he worked as fast as possible, taking pleasure in his own speed and deftness. Very soon it was done. He looked up triumphantly.

Smith said softly, ‘Strike me but you’re fast, boy.’

‘Always was,’ he said a little complacently. He handed the arquebus back to the knight. ‘My father said I was always fast, at running, archery, everything. Once some bullyboys set on us in the lane, Hodge and I, not knowing I was gentleman-born. Hodge punched them hard enough but I got behind them — we were only ten or eleven, mind, they a year or two older — and I struck ’em all across their heads with a milkpail, ding ding ding like a set of bells. They never even knew I was there. I climbed trees fast, I went up like a cat, I swam fast even-’

He stopped abruptly and bit his tongue. He was boasting like a drunk Spaniard.

‘Ay,’ said Smith, not minding overmuch. The boy had earned a boast or two. ‘You move like a Severn eel.’

He handed the arquebus to Hodge. ‘You learn too. Master Nicholas: instruct him.’

‘How do you make a Maltese Cross?’

‘Is this another of your side-splitting puns, Ned Stanley?’

‘Kick his Maltese arse!’

‘You were a loss to the jesting profession, truly.’

‘I have another.’

‘Keep it.’

‘How do you make a Spanish donkey-’

‘I said keep it.’

It was then that Nicholas saw something, clinging halfway up the rigging. Other eyes constantly scanned the eastern horizon, on the lookout for an armada of numberless warships. But Nicholas’s gaze was to the south.

‘I see it!’ he cried. ‘I see it!’

‘There she is,’ said Stanley, vaulting onto the prow. And both Knights of St John felt a surge of unspeakable pride.

As they sailed closer, the little ship gently rising and falling, the boy saw it was so small a place, so dirt poor and tiny an island where this great battle would be decided. He had never realised before how pathetically small and poor. Suddenly a deep, clear calm possessed him. Just as Elizabeth’s England was no more than a small, unregarded island off the shoulder of Europe, barely considered by the mighty continental kingdoms of France and Spain, Portugal and the Holy Roman Empire, so was Malta. A sunburnt rock in the far southern Mediterranean, far closer to Africa than Rome. Too insignificant for great kings and potentates to waste their armies on. Yet one Emperor had noticed it, and understood its significance.

Suleiman had bent his dark eye upon it, the whirlwind was coming, and an army of forty thousand men was about to fall upon this one small rock of an island. Nicholas felt the glory of it stir deep in his blood. Once at school there was a small boy being bullied by four bigger lads. They taunted him and then began to whip him with hazel sticks, as you would a cowering dog, for amusement. Then Nicholas had gone in with fists flying, only six or seven himself, and the bullies scattered. His father was proud of him that day, and in the evening he ate rice pudding with plums and as much sugar as he wanted, which was a lot.

He smiled strangely to himself, hanging from the rigging, sun in his eyes, the island drawing nearer. He thought of his father, the bullied little boy, and his sisters. The green hills of Shropshire. The little lion-tawny island shimmered in its heat haze on the sea, the sun beginning to set in the west, and he smiled to himself. Here was where it had all been heading, after all. Here was his destiny.