The Great Siege

5

For a while he thought he was in the pound with Hodge. It was dark, his head throbbed, his mouth tasted of steel.

‘Is that you, Hodge?’ he muttered, the words thick and clumsy on his lips.

‘Grace à Dieu,’ said a man’s voice softly. ‘Brother — I mean, English boy. Can you hear me?’

Nicholas nodded. His head throbbed worse with every movement. And he could see nothing. ‘I am blindfolded, yes?’

‘We three,’ said De la Rivière. ‘We are captured.’ He sounded exhausted by these few words, and paused to draw strength. ‘Do you have any blade left on you, boy?’

Nicholas shook his head, and then laughed weakly. The knight couldn’t see him. ‘No,’ he said. ‘None.’

There was a long silence.

‘What will become of us?’

‘It would be better,’ said De la Rivière slowly, ‘if we had a blade. It would be a better way out.’ He gasped with sudden pain. ‘Have you faith, boy? Do you fear to die, to go to Christ in heaven?’

‘No. No I do not. Nor to join the souls that have gone before.’

‘Then make your prayers.’ He drew breath. ‘I believe this battle is over for us now.’

A door was kicked open, there were heavy footfalls and their blindfolds were ripped off.

They were huddled on the beaten earth floor of the tiny bare chapel of the village they had fought for. It contained nothing but a plain altar table and one high window. Their hands were tied behind their backs. Faraone was still naked, curled up like a child, shivering, hiding his shame. De la Rivière seemed baptised in blood from head to toe, now dried black and crusted. The shaft of a broken arrow still protruded from his shoulder. He breathed with pain. Nicholas himself had a bad head, and his vision swam if he moved too quickly. But he could move little. He felt very tired and very afraid, and desperately thirsty.

Before them stood the Turks come to torture them, led by Mustafa himself. There was a tall thin fellow, naked to the waist, wearing a wolf’s tooth necklace on a rawhide string, and with a simple bare curved yatagan dagger at his belt, and there were two senior Janizaries. Now Nicholas could see them close to and study them, they were magnificent men, with a far gaze, oiled dark hair, noble features. They wore broad billowing white robes beneath tight mail jerkins, high domed helmets, and immense curved scimitars at their sides. The weapons had beautiful damascened scrollwork along the blade, the tiny grooves still showing the dark rust-red of old blood. One wore a brass quill through the skin above his deep furrowed brow.

Mustafa’s expression was of glowering anger at the insolent attack. He nodded at De la Rivière. ‘You are a Knight of St John. These are acolytes, yes?’

‘They are nuns,’ said De la Rivière.

‘If we put you to the torture, you may prove brave. So shall we start with torturing your acolytes? Or should I say, catamites?’

The knight said, ‘The moment you begin to torture either of these, I will bite through my own tongue and spit it in the dust. Besides, they know nothing of worth.’

‘So you do? Then tell us. What is the weakest point of Birgu?’

De la Rivière just smiled through broken teeth and split lips.

‘Drag him onto that table there,’ commanded Mustafa.

‘It is called an altar.’

‘How fitting.’

With their backs turned, Nicholas shuffled up close to the naked Faraone, now shaking like a leaf. It was the only comfort he could give. The boy was already far gone. Nicholas tried to warm him. But it was not cold that made him shiver. Hearing the tortured screams would finally destroy his reason.

For a minute or two, De la Rivière made no sound. The torturer also worked in silence. Blood dripped, spotting the floor beneath the altar, and at one point there was a ripping sound, like fine leather being torn. Nicholas closed his eyes and hung his head. Faraone’s eyes were wide open, staring wildly into the chapel’s roof space.

‘Be elsewhere,’ whispered Nicholas. ‘Think yourself another place, hear birdsong, the sea.’

But the other boy could not. He was trapped in hell.

Behind them, Mustafa said, ‘Speak. Talk to us.’

They heard De la Rivière praying. He spoke the names of St John and the Blessed Virgin and his Saviour, Christ the Lord.

The torture continued, and then quite suddenly, without warning, the knight broke. He arched his back and screamed out, ‘Castile! The bastion of Castile!’

He subsided and sobbed.

‘Wash him down,’ said Mustafa, already turning and striding for the door. ‘And watch these two.’ He bent an evil eye on Nicholas. ‘Especially this one. He is a snake.’

Piyale asked, ‘You trust the word of a tortured man?’

Mustafa said, ‘Few men would suffer torture so long, only to lie. Nevertheless he is a Knight Hospitaller, our ancient enemy, and trustworthy as Shaitan himself. We will not send in the Janizaries. Not yet.’ He turned to a senior officer. ‘Call up the first division of the Bektaşis. We attack the bastion of Castile tomorrow dawn.’

‘Where is Copier’s scouting party?’ demanded La Valette.

The lookout shook his head.

All day from the land walls of Birgu they kept their eyes on the southern horizon and the heights of Santa Margherita. The night watches leaned on the battlements and strained their eyes under the starlight. The land lay still. Not a dog barked. The stars wheeled silently in a velvet sky.

Then at dawn they heard the sound of a deep, distant rumbling in the earth. Citizens clutched tables, doorposts, thinking it was an earthquake. Some lay on the ground in the street.

‘Little that will avail you!’ cried a German knight, striding past to his post, clanking with armour.

People scowled at the arrogant knight. The Hospitallers had always looked down on them. One said sullenly, ‘It is no terramoto?’

‘No terramoto. The guns are coming.’

Stanley and Smith shared an eyeglass, looking out at the heights of Santa Margherita. There came another sound, of drums approaching. Cries rang out all around the walls, and immediately every man was donning his armour and seizing his weapons and running to battle stations, heart thumping. Above the drums sounded a braying brass horn. They were truly coming.

And then over the heights came line upon line of attackers. Gilded flags and waves of white silk robes casting long shadows, early sunlight flashing, dancing on polished shields and scabbards decorated with coloured glass, drums beating out a relentless dead-march rhythm.

Arquebusiers on the walls loaded and set their pans and checked their fuses. Crossbowmen stepped in their foot stirrups and ratcheted back and levered and set in the bolts and stood to the battlements again. They sighted.

The attackers stopped. An Imam pronounced the blessing of Allah on them, and they cried out with one huge voice,

‘Allahu akbar!’

The sound of that roar of faith was more terrible than any battery of guns.

Then the ranks of men parted, and the black mouths of bronze cannon appeared in their midst. The infantrymen retreated a long way, giving the guns plenty of room. The Turks had brought up a battery of eight on wheeled carriages. Gunners moved busily about their beasts, wedging the carriages against recoil, priming and loading, while a gunnery master surveyed the walls, estimating trajectories with a superbly practised eye.

‘Those are big guns,’ said Stanley.

‘But far from the biggest.’

‘Testing shots. They seem to be ranging on Castile. I wonder …’

Then knights along the walls were bowing low. It was the Grand Master, bringing up the Spanish tercios in reserve, and come to take personal command of the south walls.

At a barked order from La Valette, seeing instantly that the attack was to be concentrated on Castile, the knights of Provence, Auvergne and France moved out onto their own flanking towers and walls in neat order, turning their arquebuses towards the bastion of Castile, ready for enfilading fire.

The Ottoman guns roared, almost in unison, a single, rolling thunder, and then hard cracks as the balls struck home against the sloped walls of Castile. Men ducked swiftly back behind the battlements as shards of stone flew up amid vast plumes of smoke and dust. They were using cannonballs of marble. Younger knights sprang up again too soon, but older hands dragged them back down and told them to keep their heads covered, faces lowered. Marble cannonballs fired with such force could send up burning splinters weighing a pound or more, hundreds of feet into the air. Then they came down again.

In the hot still air the clouds of dust formed great shielding curtains, impenetrable to the eye. And beyond the clouds of dust arose a fanatic howl, filled with madness, rage and longing.

‘Bektaşis,’ said Smith. ‘Deranged with Allah and hemp.’

The Turks were only loosing one barrage. Now their infantrymen were already running at the walls with ropes, grapples and scaling ladders, still unseen beyond their own screen of dust, scimitars flashing and turning in the air.

La Valette raised an arm.

‘Arquebusiers!’

His arm dropped.

At no more than fifty paces, the enfilading volley was devastating. The smoke roiled and the dust swirled, yet immediately La Valette had the second rank of arquebusiers step forward and loose their volley, though they could barely see their target. Another deafening roar, and many more screams below. There came a third volley, and then the guns were rested and the crossbowmen took over, loosing another three volleys of bolts into the ranks of Bektaşis, then cranking back and reloading a fourth time and waiting for the dust to settle.

‘Free fire!’ called La Valette.

They waited to aim clear and pick off individuals. Slowly the dust settled.

There were not enough attackers left standing for the fifty crossbowmen to shoot. A single fanatic, his white turban dyed red, stood and swayed, waving his scimitar, eyes to the sun in the east already blinded, chanting the names of Allah. In a second he was stuck with more than half-a-dozen hurtling bolts, and went to Paradise.

‘Hold!’ said La Valette.

A waste of bolts.

The dust finally drifted away on the summer air.

All down from the heights of Santa Margherita, and below the bastion of Castile, lay a mown field of red bodies. Here and there came a groan, a twitching limb. An arm was raised. La Valette signalled to the crossbowman nearest and the wounded man was killed. After that, the defenders did not even bother to shoot the last few wounded. They would die soon anyway in this heat. They saved their bolts for later.

Not one attacker had come close to scaling the bastion walls. Emerging through their own blinding dust clouds, the Bektaşis had found the great walls of Castile barely grazed, let alone cracked or ruptured enough to permit an incursion. As Stanley thought, this was nothing but a test. Knights and soldiers looked down soberly on the field of tangled Ottoman dead. None celebrated. This was a very small beginning indeed. And if the Turk could be so prodigal with so many of his own troops, there would be many more to come.

Mustafa was incensed. There was no weak spot, or if there was, it certainly wasn’t Castile. Birgu was a fortified town of grim strength in every yard of its towering curtain wall.

He wheeled his horse and rode south, covering three rough miles in a quarter of an hour. His horse was nearly lamed.

He stood at the door of the chapel and regained his composure before entering.

Da la Rivière was an ugly sight, for all the washing and bandaging. But he remained conscious. The naked boy now twitched and jabbered to himself on the floor. The fairheaded one, the whiteskinned snake, looked him insolently in the eye.

Mustafa said to them, ‘The capital of this island is Mdina. This is an Arabic name, the Arabic for “city”. You know this, in your hard Christian hearts. And Arabic is a holy language, the holy language, the language of the Prophet and the Koran. This Malta was an Arab island once, a Muslim island, and Mdina was a city of Islam.’

‘Things change,’ whispered De la Rivière, his voice as dry as sand.

Still insolent, still defiant. Curse him. Would these knights never yield?

‘It will be a Muslim island again!’

‘How was the assault on Castile?’ asked the boy.

Mustafa did not even strike him. It was useless with such a one.

He ordered all three dragged outside.

The naked acolyte was mad. The knight was almost dead with his injuries, he would not make it through another night. Mustafa ground his teeth. Though the fairhaired boy was the most insolent, the most unbreakable of all, with his eyes like blue ice … it would have to be him.

A Janizary dragged Faraone forward and drew his scimitar. The boy’s lips moved but they could hear no words.

‘He is only a boy,’ whispered Da la Rivière.

‘Old enough to die,’ said Mustafa.

The scimitar flashed down, and Faraone’s head rolled in the dust. Nicholas had never seen a sight so pitiful. But he did not look away. He commended his soul to heaven.

De la Rivière was beaten slowly to death with fine rods. It took a long time. He never begged for mercy nor made a sound, but Nicholas knew he was praying in his heart. Perhaps in those last minutes, God in his mercy reached down and took away his pain. And that moment before, when he had broken under torture, in the chapel, and cried out … He had been acting all the time. The slim, aristocratic Frenchman, the elegant swordsman — he was made of something harder than steel.

Even Mustafa had enough chivalry in him to allow a man a last few words. The beating paused.

‘For our three deaths,’ De la Rivière said, his mouth drooling spittle and blood, but smiling, teeth gleaming through the blood. ‘You have lost two hundred men or more. At Castile. This is how it will go with you. A prophecy of what is to come.’

The soldiers raised their rods to finish him, but at last Mustafa stayed them. The courage of this flint-hearted infidel touched even him. Let him die a man’s death, at least. He gave the order, and a scimitar blade came down.

Mustafa bent his dark eye on Nicholas.

‘Alone of all his tribe,’ he sneered.

‘Be quick about it then,’ said the boy.

The Pasha smiled. ‘It tastes foul in my mouth. But it is you who will ride back alive to your comrades, and tell them all. Wear this around your throat and my men will not molest you. Let your comrades know everything. Be sure to tell them of the horror that awaits.’

Nicholas took the decorated green cloth with distaste, tempted to drop it to the ground. But he would never pass by the enemy watchmen without it. He knotted it round his neck.

His horse was brought over, the wound in her belly sewn with strands of her own mane and daubed with turps and earth. He mounted up.

‘I wonder if we will meet again before you die,’ said Mustafa.

‘Once is enough, I think. You filthy mule-fucker.’

Then saving his spurs on the animal’s wounded flank, he lashed the reins and trotted north.

Mustafa cursed himself for not cutting off a hand or a foot.

His head still hurt, his vision shimmered, and not only from the afternoon heat haze on the earth. When he reached a spot of shade beneath a carob, he dismounted and was suddenly overwhelmed with grief and revulsion. The dead boy Faraone, an innocent heart, and the horrible torture of De la Rivière. The butchered peasant woman … He leaned and spewed, bilious spew upon the baked ground. His stomach was void, his throat more parched than ever. Mustafa had refused him even a mouthful of water. Only this accursed Mohammedan token about his throat. It burned his skin.

He remounted and sat a moment in the shade. He must have water soon or he would be pissing black. Yet he felt a little better. Things were clearer. Some things. His ardent heart, his fierce loyalty to his father and his sisters and his name, even to Hodge; his love of comradeship, his appetite for glory, and for righteous vengeance. Now he had an object for his temper and his many passions. Of course he had come to Malta to fight the Mohammedan. But now he would fight them with savage joy in his heart, and absolute conviction. For his father and his mother, his sisters, for England and St George. For Christendom, for the Knights, for the magnificent, defiant scornful peasant woman beheaded by the Turks. For Copier and Faraone and De la Rivière, and all the tough soldiers and gallant knights yet to die.

He screwed up his eyes and heeled his horse gently forward into the white blaze.

For all of them.

‘Open the gates!’

A party of Turks watched from the heights of Santa Margherita not half a mile off, their muskets trained on his back. But he wore the green neckerchief of protection. The drawbridge swung down, the gates of Birgu swung open. Nicholas stopped his horse on the narrow drawbridge and tore off the neckerchief and looked back at them, unsure if they could see. In case they could, he leaned back and made as if wiping his horse’s arse with the cloth, embroidered with the sacred names in Arab script. Then he dropped it in the dust behind him and walked his horse in. A shot rang out wild. The gates slammed shut.

Stanley came running, and also Hodge.

‘God’s mercy, boy, you’re alive!’

‘Alive and well,’ croaked Nicholas, slithering from the horse and finding his legs didn’t work. Hodge held him.

‘Water!’ bellowed Stanley.

The boy drank.

‘Slowly.’ After only a few tantalising glugs, the knight pulled the flask away. ‘The others?’

Nicholas shook his head.

‘Copier too? De la Rivière?’

‘They all died fighting. We faced two hundred or more. We charged them … Copier gave the order. They had murdered a woman.’

Stanley gripped his sword hilt. ‘This is a sad loss. A bitter loss.’

‘I was no hero. I did not break free, the Turks let me go. The tall fellow in the black robe, their leader.’

‘Mustafa Pasha himself?’ Stanley’s blue eyes were round. ‘La Valette will want to speak with you. When we’ve got you bandaged.’

‘I’m fine,’ he said. ‘I only took a blow to the head.’

The knight of the lost English langue looked almost guilty. ‘You’ve not looked in a glass of late.’

‘The Turks offered me none. Nor roasted mutton, nor sherbet, nor harem girls. The uncouth barbarians. More water.’

He gave him the flask again. ‘Then to the infirmary with you.’