The Great Siege

2

‘Inglis! Inglis! Up stir your asses! Franco Briffa is returned home!’

Nicholas awoke, scratching. It was dark. A monstrous bull-voice was roaring in the tiny courtyard, just outside their thin door, his language a baffling polyglot mix of heavily accented Italian and snatches of Maltese.

‘Franco Briffa is returned from the bastard sea, with his great friend the bastard Anton Zahra, bringing fresh fish for your Inglis dinner. Appear! Stand before us! Let us see these noble heroes of England!’

Hodge and Nicholas stumbled out of the door, dopey after only two hours’ sleep. It was yet early evening, the air still as warm as an English summer noon, and the little town of Birgu was all astir once more.

Before them, seemingly filling the little courtyard from wall to wall, was a man of some thirty-five years. Of medium height, but barrel-chested, with mighty forearms, thick black hair, huge, black oiled moustache, and large, fiercely burning eyes. Strong white teeth gleamed as he grinned, but instantly vanished when he set eyes on the two skinny, weary, travel-stained young heroes.

‘You are the soldiers come to defend us against the Turk?’

They nodded.

He braced himself and swallowed down his grievous disappointment. ‘Well,’ he said. Then, returning to his customary volume, ‘Well! You are welcome into the home of Franco Briffa.’ He shook their hands violently and clapped them on the back. ‘I never meet an Inglis before now. You are no filthy Protestant like the fat Dutch? But no, you are Inglis, and gentlemen I see from your hands, at least you are, not him. Now, come and eat sardines, gentleman and his peasant both. And meet my family.’

They emerged into the little courtyard and were seated on low stools. Nicholas couldn’t believe how sweet the air was, scented with orange and lemon blossom — and how warm too. Yet it was night! What on earth would it be like in the day? And to fight in?

The door onto the street was left wide open and people went by, many carrying sacks and stones. Even at this late hour, when all good Englishmen would have been long abed. Some called in greetings. Life was lived in public here.

Franco Briffa lit candles and stuck them in niches. A small fire burned in a brazier, fed with animal dung.

‘So that’s what they use for firewood here,’ muttered Hodge.

Franco Briffa indicated an ancient woman on a stool by the brazier, apparently feeling the cold. ‘My beloved mother, Mama Briffa. My dear wife’ — he seized the shy woman as she entered from the little room opposite, and turned her to face them, her face bowed — ‘Mother of my two wicked sons. Il bambino, over there in the cradle. Here is my two young sons, very wicked, they are Mateo and Tito.’ Two young boys, perhaps eleven and nine, stared up at the two foreign soldiers in their house, bursting with excitement and curiosity. ‘And my daughter, my eldest’ — he roared out — ‘Maddalena!’ He glared back at them. ‘You will hearken to me now, yes? Franco Briffa does not lie.’

They nodded, bewildered.

A slim girl of fourteen or fifteen stepped into the courtyard, wearing a simple pale blue dress and a headscarf. He seized her as he had his wife, and turned her to face them.

‘She is pretty, is she not? She is most beautiful, the most beautiful girl perhaps in all Malta?’

She was. Very pretty, her face aglow in the light of the brazier.

‘She takes after her father! No, no, I jest,’ and he pulled his wife to his side under a bearlike arm and crushed her to him. ‘She takes after her mother. But she is pretty as a flower, and you are young men, and under our roof, and so I tell you this. If either of you Inglis approach nearer to her than the length of two arms, let alone God save us reach out and touch her — then I, Franco Briffa, will cut off your testicles and feed them to the pigs.’

Old Mama Briffa cackled on her stool. ‘He will, he will!’

Mateo and Tito giggled.

Franco Briffa added an obscene gesture for illustration, glaring at the two boys fiercely, as if in anticipation, driving his forefinger hard through a ring made with his opposing forefinger and thumb. He seemed very concerned with his daughter’s virginity. Nicholas wanted to protest that his host had no reason to fear that he, an English gentleman, would so abuse his hospitality. But he couldn’t think of the right words.

The girl meanwhile was flushed with embarrassment, which only made her look prettier.

Franco Briffa pushed both wife and daughter firmly away. ‘Now go, women! And you, children, it is time you were in bed.’ Mateo and Tito began to protest passionately, until he roared in their faces. Then he called after the women, ‘Bring us food. Sardines, bread, wine, the very food that Christ and his disciples ate to stay strong!’

The three ate heartily, the women scurrying back and forth to bring them more and more. Nicholas looked fixedly ahead whenever the girl appeared. She would give him dreams. His heart thumped, and he no longer thought back to the barmaid in Cadiz.

Franco Briffa ate most heartily of all, slapping his wife’s bottom whenever she brought out more sardines from the cool dark larder to fry on the fire.

‘Caught this very afternoon by myself and my great friend the bastard Anton Zahra. Are they not the finest you ever tasted? It is the dungfire that flavours them so sweetly.’ He mopped his mouth and refilled their wine cups. Nicholas tried to avoid a refill but failed. The wine was very thin and pale red and not easy to distinguish from vinegar. But a cup or two certainly warmed the stomach. Franco Briffa drank some four pints.

The smoke arose slowly into the square of starlit night above them. Goats bleated, a dog barked. It seemed so peaceful. Yet none could forget the ominous shadow hanging over them, nor that this might be the last such night as this.

At last, nearly dropping off his stool for weariness, Nicholas managed to say, ‘Grazzi. Hafna tajjeb.’

Franco Briffa went silent, a hunk of bread halfway to his mouth. ‘What did you say, Inglis?’

Thinking he had made some terrible mistake, Nicholas repeated the words uncertainly.

With violent abruptness, Franco Briffa leapt to his feet and bellowed, ‘Why, it is an astonishment!’

Someone called in through the open courtyard doorway, ‘Quit your shouting, Franco Briffa, you’ll wake the dead from their graves!’

But Franco was impervious. ‘Speak again, Inglis!’

Nicholas said the words once more.

‘An astonishment, I tell you! The Inglis sits in my house for no more than a bat’s fart, eats a little bread, drinks a little wine, and now he is talking already like a native Maltese.’ He seized Nicholas by the arm and dragged him out into the street.

‘Hear the Inglis!’ roared Franco at anyone prepared to listen. ‘It is an astonishment! Come hear him! Speak again, Inglis! Pronounce! Declaim! Listen to him, you fools, and hearken. It is a miracle! He has learnt to speak the ancient tongue of Malta in a half a minute. He is a genius!’

People nodded and smiled as they hurried by under their loads. Nicholas’s head swam with tiredness and wine. A floor above, on a tiny balcony, a girl’s faced peeped out. He glanced up. She vanished.

After the great performance, they went back inside and Franco Briffa insisted they had another cup of wine, while he told them how he used to be a bad man, a wild youth. He used to drink and chase whores, but now he was married to his beloved Maria, he drank no more, well, only a little. He drained his fifth pint of wine. Now he worshipped God with all the devotion of his heart, as devotedly as he once drank and chased whores.

‘Not that whores need much chasing!’ he guffawed.

His listeners nodded, half asleep.

‘Well,’ said Franco Briffa, wiping the wine from his moustache. ‘Tomorrow, my Inglis friends, I would hear of your country, infidel and cold and full of red-haired women. After that, I fear, there will be little time for drinking and telling tales.’

Nicholas awoke to the sound of shouts and cries. He knew where he was instantly, and dread seized him. The Turks had come.

He kicked Hodge and ran out into the courtyard. Early sunlight touched the roofs. People in the street were calling. He looked out. But no, it was only a busy day, no one was panicking yet. His head felt cold and sickly from the wine. Everyone, men, women and children, was up and working. Poor they may be, this peasant people, but they were no idlers. And then cursing himself for a fool, he understood. This was not the ordinary business of the little town. Day and night, for days and weeks past, the people had been following the lead of the knights, and making preparations for war. These sacks of earth and sand, these rocks and stones — they were no innocent burden. They were the stuff of war, being carried to the walls.

He felt ashamed. He must go and join them at once.

‘Come and eat first, Inglis!’ cried Franco behind him, reading his mind.

He and Hodge sat on a step in the courtyard, and it was Maddalena who brought them bread and two cups and a jug of goat’s milk.

She wore a red headscarf and this morning a thin gauze veil over the lower half of her face, so that only her dark eyes showed. Like a Turkish girl. Yet he could not avoid noticing the gentle swell of her figure as she leaned down to pour the milk, and as she breathed, the thin veil moved in and out on that tiny breeze, and he could see the full lips of her mouth. She kept her eyes from him all the time, until one last moment when she glanced at him, and he was looking at her, and their eyes met.

She snatched the jug away as if stung and almost ran back inside.

‘The maids here,’ said Hodge, chewing philosophically, ‘are certainly more naturally maids than some of their kind back in England.’

The goat’s milk tasted sweet, and the crusted white bread. This land so sun-warmed and earthy, where the blood flowed so hot in the veins — and yet so pious and restrained withal, the widows in black, the maids in headscarves and veils …

Then a church bell began to ring, a steady, insistent tolling. A call to remember why they were here, which was not for young girls in their pale blue dresses.

‘They are mules, these Maltese,’ said Stanley. ‘Look at them. They have not always loved the knights, as we lorded it over them. But now look how they work. Like mules.’

He meant it as a high compliment.

It was only then that Nicholas understood the knights in their pitifully small numbers were not alone. Shoulder to shoulder with them would fight the Maltese people. He felt a lump in his throat. He thought of hurtling cannonballs, fragmenting stone, searing flame, and of Maddalena. Also a surge of pride in being part of this. Men, women and children would fight alongside the knights for their island home, against a fully professional army.

‘Nor will they surrender, as the people did at Rhodes,’ said Smith. ‘They say, We are not Rhodian, we are not Greek, we are not Italian nor Spanish nor Arab. We are Maltese. And we do not surrender.’

They slung great blocks of limestone under wooden beams and hoisted them onto Birgu’s old, battlemented walls to build them higher, or to brace them at weak points. They dug ditches and cleared away what little brushwood remained nearby.

The mighty voice of a foreman roared out, ‘We shall starve them, they will find nothing here to sustain them!’ It was the voice of Franco Briffa. ‘Not a fig, not a twig, not a green leaf, not a drop of clean water, nothing will the worshippers of the devil Mahound find here to sustain them. This island will be to them as harsh and lifeless and lonely as the surface of the moon!’

An old man said, ‘Some say the moon has lakes and seas on it, as you can see at night.’

‘If I say the moon is lifeless,’ said Franco Briffa, ‘then it is lifeless.’

All the huts and dwellings beyond the walls of Senglea and Birgu were razed. The dirt-poor inhabitants, driving forth their goats, leading their children, infants in arms, did not weep or protest. They set down their infants and tethered their goats and went back and razed their huts and dwellings themselves.

‘Well,’ said one woman, looking over the blank landscape, face grim, ‘a poor dwelling it was anyway, and will not not take much to rebuild. When the Turks are defeated.’

These people, thought Nicholas, hefting a load of timber on his shoulder and trudging back up to the city gates. They are made of the same rock as their island.

Word spread like wildfire that Don Garcia de Toledo, the Spanish Viceroy of Sicily, had sailed into the Grand Harbour under cover of darkness, spoken hurriedly with La Valette, and vanished again before dawn.

‘Like a thief in the night,’ said Smith. ‘And did he bring any Spanish tercios with him?’

De Guaras laughed sourly. ‘He left not so much as a perfumed fart.’

Yet Stanley said it was no mean thing for Don Garcia to make the crossing from Sicily to Malta, so late in the day. He was but a servant of King Philip, and Don Garcia would have reminded La Valette that even Spain, greatest of the Christian powers, could put to sea a navy of only thirty-five fully manned war galleys. The navy of Suleiman the Magnificent numbered an unimaginable hundred and seventy galleys or more. If Spain went up against the Turk face-to-face, it would be utterly destroyed. Even if all the Christian powers were to unite under a single banner — not a likely eventuality — they would still be hard-pressed to meet such a force. Philip must guard his own kingdom before he could save Malta. If it were possible, relief would be sent. But for now, the knights must fight alone.

Don Garcia de Toledo had offered to take away as many women and children and elderly as his ship could carry back to the safety of Sicily, though the people had refused in one voice.

‘Wise decision,’ said De Guaras. ‘The people know well that if the Turk takes Malta, he will fall upon Sicily soon enough anyway.’

For a mile out of the city and more, the ground was stripped of cover and scorched black. Last year’s wheat was brought into Birgu and Senglea, and carried down into cool dry underground storerooms, part of a labyrinthine system of tunnels hewn into solid rock beneath the city. They stored further food cargoes captured by the Chevalier Romegas on his ceaseless raids on Muslim shipping. It was not jewels and silks, spices and gold that would avail them now, but barley and raisins, dried fish and salt meat, and Arab medicines of the finest to treat wounds and fevers.

Quartermasters counted in ten thousand bushels of grain, huge rounds of Gozo cheese, dried tunny, olive oil, sacks of sesame seeds and Damascus dates. The vast water cisterns were still almost full from the winter rains, and there were several springs never known to fail within the walls.

All wells and springs without the walls were poisoned with a foul mix of hemp, flax and ordure. Though water was the very stuff of life, there was no hesitation. Nothing would be left for the invader but bare rock and burning sun. This was war. War to the knife.

Sometimes wells were even poisoned with arsenic, or a dead animal.

‘That’ll take some cleaning after,’ said one.

‘But we will have numberless Mohammedan slaves to work for us,’ said another.

From the high battlemented walls of San Angelo, at the northern tip of Birgu, La Valette looked down. San Angelo would take a battering before it fell. Grim fortress walls topped by another, higher inner enclosure, thickly battlemented. It was good to let the eye roam over its massive proportions. Angled bastions, slanted parapets for deflecting direct hits, splayed gun ports, inner defensive lines — the new architecture of defence in the age of gunpowder.

He looked repeatedly towards the eastern horizon, and westward over the island. But he also looked north with a thoughtful expression, at Mount Sciberras, the great bare promontory that formed the opposite side of the Grand Harbour. There had been much talk of building a grand new city there, in a far more commanding position than the little huddled towns of Birgu and Senglea. Or at least an imposing new fort.

But it was all talk, and no money. Nothing had been done. Even the single modest building there now had not been rebuilt or strengthened in any way, and it was there that La Valette’s gaze fell. The small, star-shaped fort of St Elmo. Unlike San Angelo, the little fort on Mount Sciberras was hardly of the latest design.

He sent across work parties to do what they could to strengthen the walls, and ordered them to build an outlying ravelin on its far side, in the unlikely event that the Turks should ever try to attack St Elmo overland.

He also allowed them a few more cannons, though Birgu and San Angelo were already cruelly short of firepower. The might of the Ottoman fist would of course fall upon Birgu and San Angelo. Yet St Elmo guarded the mouth of the Grand Harbour, and before the Turks could anchor their great armada there safely, it would have to be reduced.

Suddenly a cry went up.

‘A ship! A ship!’

Nobody panicked, but many rushed to the walls and strained their eyes eastwards. It had begun.

But it was only a single ship, and it came from the north, from Sicily. A long, low galley with a hull painted blood red and glistening with tallow for more speed, and flying a matching red flag with a white cross. Even its progress around the headland and into the harbour was somehow dauntless, unhurried, unafraid of the hundred galleys coming its way.

A great cheer went up from the walls.

It was the Chevalier Mathurin Romegas, bringing in more supplies, more Muslim captive slaves to work in chain gangs on the walls, and above all, two hundred Spanish tercios: the finest infantrymen in Europe. Don Garcia de Toledo had persuaded King Philip to send reinforcements after all. An absurdly small number, against the approaching Ottoman horde. But spirits greatly rose to see them.

Romegas himself had a long fine nose, a straggly beard, deep-set eyes circled with dark rings, like a man who slept little, and as Nicholas observed him making his way up to the palace of the Grand Master, Romegas’s hands shook badly.

Saluting the march past, Stanley said sidelong to Nicholas, ‘Do not think that his hands shake for fear. Since he joined the Knights at the age of fourteen, Romegas has shown himself the most fearless of any. He is of the noble house of Armagnac — and a proud Frenchman.’

‘A Gascon,’ said Smith. ‘It’s different.’

‘Once his galley was capsized and he survived underwater for twelve hours with his head in an air pocket. Something happens to a man who has looked death so close in the eye. He becomes more free. Romegas’s hands shake only because of nervous damage. But he has destroyed more than fifty Ottoman galleys, liberated more than a thousand slaves. It was he who captured the Ottoman treasure ship the Sultana and set in train this great assault on our island.’

‘Not that Romegas would apologise to anyone for that,’ said Smith.

‘No indeed.’ Stanley smiled faintly. ‘To have provoked Suleiman to outright war is probably his proudest achievement yet.’

The Spanish tercios followed Romegas, wearing their breastplates and tall morion helmets for show, and carrying their long, lethal pikes. They had a strange, almost sinister air, these hard-bitten veterans, sons of the high, bleak plains of Castile and Estremadura. Conquistadors, with faces darkened by a tropical sun, eyes distant and cold, and souls as hard as iron. They came from the New World, where they had been fighting the Christless Indians, seeing and committing who knew what atrocities there. Yet they would fight ferociously, these men, and even the heat of a Mediterranean summer might seem easy to them after the burning sun of the Peruvian Andes, or the humid jungles of Panama with its swamps, fevers and the cries of its nameless night creatures.

‘This is a war that involves the whole world,’ said Stanley softly, as if in slow realisation. ‘A war of all four continents. These soldiers returned from the Americas, paid with Inca silver, to fight in Europe against an army of Africans and Asians, and an Empire that rules to the borders of Tartary and Persia.’

‘And all focused on this tiny island in the sea,’ said Smith. ‘Like a glass focusing the sun, and burning a hole through parchment.’

La Valette promptly dictated the new arrivals their stations, and then had them help to arm the walls and bring up supplies. Not barley and dates now, but grimmer materials. Bandages and wadding, splints, flasks of alcohol. Spare recoil ropes for the culverins, arquebus balls in cases and cannonballs stacked in neat pyramids. Assembled pot guns that threw brass bombs full of Greek fire, clay pots of naphtha and fire hoops pasted with evil concoctions that would adhere to clothing and flesh and not cease from burning even underwater: pitch and tar, phosphorus and magnesium, even date wine and honey to make the stuff stick.

The knights knew every secret of siege warfare, and how to fight when hopelessly outnumbered, using the utmost aggression and every destructive martial device known to man.

The Spanish infantrymen and the knights set up high trajectory mortars to arc over the walls like arrows, needing no risky sighting or aiming. La Valette also gave orders for huge casks of water to be set up at regular intervals around the walls of Birgu and Senglea, both for drinking and for extinguishing the deadly fires that would soon be burning.

‘Before long,’ the soldiers joked, with the black humour of soldiers in all ages, ‘we’ll be tossing dead bodies down on ’em. That always causes a stink.’

La Valette disliked such jesting. They must all be worthy of their cause, even these rough-hewn soldiers. He had them go through the town and pick men of likely age, and give them rudimentary fire-arms training.

Their commanding officer was a Captain Miranda, a huge, powerfully built fellow with a great black moustache and lantern jaw, who looked like he might best even John Smith in a fight. He lined up his hasty citizen militia and told them,

‘If one of my men gets his head blown off, and drops his gun or his sword in the dust, you’re onto it in a trice. You hear me? Peasants and fishermen you may be, but you know how to spear a tuna. Well then, you can spear a Turk. We are short of everything in this coming battle. Have no respect for the dead. They will be past caring. Take up their weapons and keep fighting. It is your only hope. That and the mercy of God.’

La Valette heard the words of this Captain Miranda and liked what he heard. He ordered him to prepare a company of thirty of his soldiers to be sent over the water to St Elmo and join the station there, under the command of the stout Italian, Luigi Broglia.

‘But not yet,’ he said. ‘There remains work to do here. The moment the Grand Fleet is seen, your men will row over. You will remain here with the rest.’

He also asked for any volunteers among the knights. There was reluctance. St Elmo was a poor second to the main battle.

At last Stanley said, ‘Sire, for St John and St George, I will go.’

‘Then I too,’ said Smith.

Nicholas and Hodge counted themselves in also, and La Valette addressed them gravely, as only he could.

‘Be ready to cross over the moment the Turks are seen. It is the great battle between the Cross and the Koran which is now to be fought. We are the chosen soldiers of the Cross, and if Heaven requires the sacrifice of our lives, there can be no better occasion than this. Hasten to the sacred altar, my brothers, and be blessed with that contempt for death which alone can render us invincible.’

The waiting was the worst. No surprise it drove men mad. One hanged himself in the market square, with a note pinned to his breast asking for Allah to admit him to Paradise. Passers-by spat on the corpse of the traitor.

It made no sense. Even the Maltese people began to crack.

‘Let it come soon,’ murmured Stanley. ‘Please God.’

The sun burned down on an empty sea.

In the town, rumours flew. Spies were widely suspected. A fellow walking on the walls at night was said to be signalling to the enemy. He protested that it was only the moonlight glinting on his belt buckle, but he was beaten anyway. The next morning a Jewish family were dragged into the street and accused of allying with the Turks. Some kicked dust in their faces, and one or two even picked up stones.

La Valette had been laying the keys to the city on the altar in the Church of St John, praying to the patron saint of the Order for their protection. Hearing the news he came running, as easy as a man thirty years his junior, face black as thunder. Without a word he fell upon a man raising a stone and cuffed him to the ground with a terrific blow. Others instantly dropped their stones and lowered their faces, stepping back.

‘Ay, you cowards of men!’ said La Valette. He raised up the family of Jews where they knelt in the dust, still praying their Hebrew prayers.

‘What is your name?’

‘Isaac, Lord.’

‘Father Isaac. Your family is safe. These scoundrels will not touch a hair of your head. Go home.’

To the mob already beginning to disperse, towering over them, he said, ‘You fools! You look like none so much as those baying brutes who stoned St Stephen, our first martyr, so righteous in their own eyes. Any spies or traitors in this city are my business. Now depart!’