The Great Siege

2

In the pavilion of Mustafa Pasha, there had been a brief council.

‘I dislike the main fleet being anchored in the south, in this Marsasirocco,’ Admiral Piyale had declared. ‘Better to keep our forces together, better to anchor in Marsamuscetto, close to our main encampment.’

‘But you feared the havoc the east wind, the gregale, would cause,’ said Mustafa.

‘I believe it will not,’ said Piyale shortly. ‘I believe I was misinformed.’

Mustafa’s eyes glittered with cold amusement. It was as he had said to the aristocratic young admiral, but Piyale had refused to listen to him. Now he was humbled before him, and Mustafa was content.

‘And what of that small fort on the headland?’ said the Pasha.

Piyale said, ‘We will have to reduce it.’

Mustafa nodded. ‘We will flatten it. It takes a decade or more to make a good fortress, but this one is of a sorry build, and can only be thinly defended. It will be taken in a day or two.’

Seeing that they were shortly to be under attack, there was no sleep that night in Elmo. The place was a frenzy of activity. And though he never lost his cheery smile, Luigi Broglia suddenly showed himself a very determined commander indeed.

He appointed Medrano to succeed him should he be killed.

‘Broglia will survive longer than any of us,’ said Lanfreducci. ‘That belly of his would stop a ball from a basilisk.’

The jokes grew blacker and blacker, and ever more frequent. Imagining the very worst horrors, and laughing at them, inured a man to real horrors when they came. Between the joking, every man prayed with all the serious fervour of his faith.

‘Dear Christ and Blessed Virgin,’ prayed Nicholas. ‘Be with us in our fighting, and in our dying. May we fight with justice and honour.’ He paused. There was no praying for health and long life, nor even an easy death. The suffering were closest to Christ, and the suffering of the dying purged their souls in preparation for the sweet afterlife. A worldly fool prayed for an easy and painless life, a simple peasant prayed to the Almighty Creator to look down and cure his rheumatic aches. But he added, ‘If it be God’s will, may Hodge survive. May he make it safe back to England after. Amen. ’

And like all those who worked and prayed, he felt the presence of the Father and the Son and all the Saints, looking down in sorrow and compassion upon this bitter and bloody little human drama.

From the ramparts of Elmo, fewer than fifty knights and a hundred infantrymen watched in awe as the Ottoman siege train moved out onto Mount Sciberras. The bump and rattle of war wagons on the stony ground sounded across the peaceful waters all night long. Wagons piled high with tents and provisions, cannonballs and best corned gunpowder, lead musket balls, arrows, helmets, entrenching tools, picks, shovels, staves, ropes, iron bars, timbers, pre-assembled wooden frames for breastwork, lightweight latticed fences for cover and shade, hides, woollen sacks, sail canvas, casks of flour, rice, lentils, dried fruit and dried meat.

All drawn by donkeys and mules, horses and oxen, vast numbers of draught animals, all needing to be fed and watered. The iron laws of the material world applied to the Ottomans as much as to any Christian army. Every 1,000lbs of ordnance required a pair of draught animals to shift. So those 20,000lb basilisks alone each required a team of a staggering forty beasts. All requiring fodder, on this bare, stark, grassless island providing none. Could the very size of the Turkish forces prove a weakness? How many provisions had the Ottomans brought, even in that huge flotilla of ships? How long could they hold out?

But it was foolish to hope. The organisation of Suleiman’s armies was legendary. They would be able to wage full war all summer, there was no doubt of that. Three or four months. Against them, Elmo could only stand for three days at best, and then Birgu, by some miracle, perhaps a couple of weeks. And then the slaughter would be terrible.

No, it was foolish to hope. The men of Elmo breathed deep on the morning air and squared their shoulders. Nobility is greater than survival, went the Hospitaller saying, as honour is greater than wealth, and virtue than cleverness.

This Great Siege was not a war that could be won. It could only be a glorious war of sacrifice. And in their sacrifice, the dying knights and the people of Malta might yet bring all of Europe to unity and to arms, to rouse itself against the oncoming Armies of Islam.

Every arquebus was brought up to the walls and stacked, pouches were filled with powder and wallets filled tight with lead balls. Helmets, shields and armour were checked, swords, halberds, half-pikes and glaives given a final whetting, the sharpened edges stropped off and hardened on taut leather belts.

Smith clutched a squat, four-foot half-pike in his meaty fist, and eyed the fearsome blade at the end, half axe, half spear, with a thick spike on the reverse for good measure. ‘When the guns overheat and the powder runs out,’ he growled, ‘it’ll be these that keep ’em off the walls. A half-pike may blunt, but it never wears out.’ He tossed it at Nicholas. ‘Remember that.’

‘But meanwhile,’ said Stanley firmly, ‘you and Hodge are in the role of squires and servants, not front line fighters. You will serve the guns, bring up munitions and stores. You will leave your sword below, it will only hinder you.’

‘I will not,’ said Nicholas.

‘You will.’

‘No. You cannot command me, any more than Copier could.’

‘That I can. You are now in Elmo, in a fort of St John, and so directly under the command of the Order. Unless you wish to leave, and reside elsewhere.’

Nicholas felt a welling of angry frustration.

‘There may yet come a time to fight,’ said Smith. ‘But there’s much to be done besides, and you and Hodge will be more than useful that way.’

‘I spent most of my life humping stuff,’ said Hodge. ‘Hay bales, wattle fences, sacks of dung for the cabbage patch. So I s’pose it won’t hurt me doin’ some more, even under this sweatin’ hot sky.’

Nicholas bit his lip and gave in.

‘Your sword?’ said Stanley. ‘It will only hinder you.’

‘But keep on that breastplate,’ added Smith. ‘It’s a fine piece, and would stop all but a close shot.’

Nicholas unbelted the Italian short sword that they had given him on the ship, and left it on his pallet.

‘Now to the walls. There’s work to do.’

Elmo’s crude paparets were attacked with mallet and chisel to make some sort of crude embrasures for musket barrels, crossbows and the small field guns, repositioned now on the landward walls and up on the bastion. They were served not with smooth iron balls meant for holing incoming ships, but with chain shot and grapeshot, for wreaking atrocious damage on close-packed men at short range.

Equally fearsome were the weapons of wildfire: stacks of fire hoops the size of cartwheels, soaked in oil and wrapped in cotton bandaging, dipped in more oil, saltpetre, tallow, more cotton, rope, grass … Whatever would burn and scald and melt the fat off a man’s bones. These would be lit and blazing in an instant and then hurled out over the walls with tongs, to set alight the robes of any assailants. They had been used at Rhodes to devastating effect. There were also flame throwers, long brass pipes that could be poked out over the cracked embrasures, or even through low ducts and vents in the walls. Each pipe had a bowl at the end, something like an ale-yard, and in the bowl, a scorching mix of oil, naphtha and turpentine would be lit, often with some kind of jelly added. Even a minor explosion would erupt in a long gouting tongue of superheated flame. The admixture of the jelly — honey, date wine, anything sugary and sticky — made the flame stick to a man’s robes, his flesh, his hair, and not be put out. It was a form of the ancient terror called Greek Fire.

Butts of water were brought up with scoops tied to the rim-hoops, but food was all kept below in the stores. They would eat in the evening, when the guns went quiet.

In the largest storeroom, dimly lit with rushlights, four chaplains of St John did what they could to ready the few beds and their store of bandages and medicaments. But for the best treatment, the wounded would need to be shipped back to the Sacred Infirmary after dark. As long as the Turks left the Grand Harbour ungunned, that might still be possible.

‘Though the infidels will fire on a wounded man as readily as a fighting man, I suppose,’ said one chaplain.

‘Though infidel,’ said the Chevalier Medrano, ‘the Turks can be just as chivalrous, or as cruel, as any other men.’

The infidel too worked on through the night beneath the brilliant moon. Turkish sappers and trenchers established their forward positions, throwing up earthen ramps, great rocky barricades and defences, gun platforms growing steadily out of a flat and barren promontory. Far beyond them, nearly a mile off, the new permanent Turkish encampment spread out over the low land at the head of the Marsa.

And over on Senglea and Birgu too, the reinforcing of all defences continued. When they saw that Elmo was to be destroyed first, the knights said that the daughter was buying the mother fort precious time by her own sacrifice.

Finally a chaplain, Fra Giacomo, came round and gave them all the last rites. The wine on Nicholas’s tongue never tasted so sweet, the bread never so white and pure. Still, despite his careful prayers, not asking for health or life, as a boy he still believed he would not die. Or he feared it, but did not believe. His father used to say a man’s heart could easily hold two contradictory things true at once.

They would fight the Turks gloriously on and on until eventually they fell back, or the army of Spain would arrive from Sicily, or La Valette would send reinforcements over and drive them off. Or he and Hodge and the knights would take flight in a longboat by night, or he pictured himself diving into the sea and swimming away with the water around him whipped to a storm by musket balls. He would not die. You could not die as young as he. There was too much ahead, waiting for him. There was a girl waiting for him.

Smith and Stanley saw his lack of fear and understood. They had been young once, and thought they would never die.

Hodge was less deluded, and braver. Racked with fear, often trembling, white-faced, yet he mastered his fear. That was true bravery. He worked like a mule shifting munitions and sandbags, and if the fighting came to him, he would fight as stoutly as any.

A scout from the forward trenches came to Mustafa’s pavilion, where general and admiral sat late, eating by lantern light.

‘A priest is giving them bread and wine.’

‘They eat the body of Christ,’ said the Pasha with distaste.

‘I think it is the Last Rites,’ said Piyale.

Mustafa raised a black eyebrow.

‘You remember the ancient tale of Thermopylae,’ said Piyale. ‘When the Greeks fought the Persians in a narrow pass. A tribe of Greeks called the Spartans, much outnumbered.’

‘Persians,’ sneered Mustafa. Almost as inveterate enemies to the Turks as Christendom itself.

‘But a spy brought news to the Persian generals,’ said Piyale, ‘that the Spartans were combing their hair for battle. The Persians laughed at such women. Then the spy explained that Spartans comb their hair when they are preparing to die. And the Persians stopped laughing.’

Mustafa regarded his admiral, his stony eyes glittering. ‘I have heard this tale,’ he said. ‘The Greeks of old were not all women.’

‘It is the same with the knights,’ said Piyale. ‘These Last Rites of theirs. They are Spartans combing their hair.’

‘Preparing to die,’ said Mustafa. His thin lips twitched with a smile. ‘And so they should.’

At last it was done. They had made all the preparations they could, they snatched a few hours of sleep, and then dawn began to grey the sky.

The conical tents of Central Asia spread out over the narrow rocky peninsula of Sciberras: the tents of the East at the gates of the West. St Elmo, small and squat, stood against them. Silent and waiting. It looked trapped, like a creature driven to the end of the promontory from where it could go no further and must turn at last and fight.

The Turkish artillery squadrons had twenty-four guns in place already, protected behind wooden battlements and earth ramparts. They also brought up squat, open-mouthed mortars and bombards, crude but effective devices which looked like little more than fat flower pots. But with enough charge they could belch out stone balls high into the air, over Elmo’s walls and straight down onto parapets, roofs and walls, doing much damage.

As the sun rose higher over Gallows Point, expert Ottoman and Mameluke engineers were already adjusting gun platforms to steady the guns and achieve the highest accuracy, earthing up ramps further for better trajectories, doing calculations by arithmetic and rule of thumb, squinting, holding up their fingers, surveying, checking the length of shadows.

Meanwhile slave gangs were set to digging trenches down the scarp towards the fort. The ochre earth was all of an inch or two deep before they hit solid rock. After that it was pick and mallet. Sometimes foxholes were blown out with carefully placed packs of gunpowder. Other teams of slaves were ordered to bring up sacks of earth from the lowlands or pebbles from the beach for extra cover.

Everything proceeded swift and orderly and with an absolute sense of mastery. It was an awesome and dismaying sight. Ottoman siegecraft was, as reputed, the finest in the world. They had laid waste to the greatest fortresses from Persia to Hungary. The idea that Elmo might stand against such expertise and determination was almost laughable.

The moment the first transverse trenches were deep enough for a man to crawl in, a crack company of Janizaries was sent up at the run. They carried long, slender decorated muskets. Snipers’ muskets.

Smith took up his jezail.

‘Let us at least have first blood.’

His posture at the wall reminded Nicholas of nothing so much as his own stalking a hare or a partridge on his father’s lands. The silent waiting for the single shot that must count and kill, the infinite patience, looking out for the smallest movement, the stir of a leaf, or of a feather above the Ottoman trench line.

A single blurred movement of that white feather and Smith was onto it. He shifted his muzzle a fraction left and dropped it another fraction and fired a ball into the soft, loose earth that banked the top of the trench, aiming it just a couple of inches below where he had glimpsed movement. There was a cry and a Janizary fell against the inner trench wall, white headfeather sprayed with his own blood, his turban rapidly staining. The ball had holed his turban and cut a groove across the top of his skull.

‘Bravo!’ called Chevalier Lanfreducci down the line. ‘A fine shot — for an Englishman!’

‘Damn!’ cried Smith. ‘Had I another jezail readily loaded I could take him now where he’s slumped.’

Then hands pulled the lightly wounded man down into cover and angry cries rang out.

‘Nevertheless, first blood is ours,’ said Stanley. And he cried out in Turkish, ‘Baş kan!’

More angry cries, screams of vengeance, and throughout, Smith furiously reloading his jezail. In less than a minute he had the barrel back in the rough-hewn niche and was waiting for another vainglorious Janizary to stand and hurl abuse, and then he would have him clean. But none did. The Janizaries were as disciplined as any soldiers on earth.

‘God, let it begin,’ muttered Smith.

He was furious to fight, and Nicholas knew how he felt. He too longed for it, ached for it, with an ache as deep as love. It would be terrible and bloody and glorious, and after you might be dead or crippled or limbless, but if alive you would never know such glory again as in that wild heat of battle, and the rest of life would taste like stale bread beside it. From only that brief murderous skirmish aboard the Swan, and the mad charge on the plain with Copier, he had learnt so much already, about war, and about himself. Princes and kings, sultans and emperors, talks and treaties would come and go, but men would always fight. Only let the fight be just, and let it come soon.

For the Lord has given the horse his might, has clothed his neck with strength. He paws in the valley, he smells the battle from afar, the thunder of the captains, and the shouting. For the Lord is a man of war …