The Great Siege

5

Hodge unbuckled Nicholas’s breastplate and they went down into the yard and splashed water on their faces and drank deep at the huge wooden butt.

Two of the Spanish tercios came up behind them and Hodge silently passed them the scoop. They were the dark-burned men under Captain Miranda’s command, brought back to Spain from the Americas. They tipped the cool water back down their parched throats without touching their mouths to the edge.

Almost shyly Nicholas said, ‘So you are come from the Americas?’

The men removed their helmets and stroked back their sweat-plastered hair and leaned against the wall. Like all old soldiers, they liked to talk of their deeds to wide-eyed youngsters, as long as the youngsters looked suitably impressed by their tales, and didn’t ask too many damn fool questions.

‘What age are you? And what is your accent?’ demanded one.

‘I am sixteen, an Englishman. My name is Nicholas. This is Hodge.’

‘What are Protestant Englishmen doing in this slaughterhouse?’

‘We are Catholic. My father was an English Knight Hospitaller, until his langue was disbanded.’

‘Ah. By your fat redbeard king. The one with as many wives as an Arab.’

‘King Henry. Father of my Queen.’

The soldier nodded, a faint smile. ‘Well,’ he said. ‘You have chosen a pretty place for your foreign travels. I am told the wild-flowers here this time of year can be a picture.’

The other guffawed and produced a rock-hard stick of salt pork.

Nicholas waited patiently.

‘I am García,’ he said. ‘This is Zacosta.’

Nicholas bowed his head a little. Hodge didn’t.

Then the first, García, said, ‘I was a youth little older than than you, and like you a stranger in a strange land, when we first rode out with Vasquez de Coronado, out of Mexico and across the Rio Grande. We went looking for the Seven Cities of Gold. For you know that Hernan Cortés himself said, I suffer from a disease of the heart, which can only be cured by gold. But along with our swords and our guns we also took our priests. To save the souls of the Indios, you understand?’

The other, Zacosta, smiled and sliced through the salt port and handed him and Hodge a slice on his knife.

These were dangerous men, their jokes as dark and secret as the grave. Yet they were good to have on your side.

‘It’s our souls need saving now,’ said Zacosta. ‘We have been sent to Elmo to die.’

‘Not me,’ said García. He hefted his sturdy arquebus, and he did not indeed look like a man whose time had come to die. ‘I’m here to kill some Turks, take some Mohammedan scalps, dry ’em out nicely in the sun and decorate ’em with beads and quills the way the Indios do.’

Zacosta laughed.

‘Then I’m off back to old Spain, to find me a pretty young wife and good vineyard, somewhere along the green banks of the Ebro. And I’ll hang up the scalps of the Mohammedans on the door of my house, and sit out of an evening and toast ’em with my own wine, with my pretty young wife in my lap, as the sun goes down over the mountains of Old Castile.’

They were reckless and hard-hearted men, yet they were Christians, and on the right side, and there was something in their wild and savage humour and their sheer carelessness that was consoling and fortifying after the atrocities of the day.

The sun going down … pretty young wife …

Suddenly Nicholas tossed the scoop back in the butt and muttering, ‘My pardon,’ raced away across the yard, and up the steps to the southern wall. Hodge and the soldiers looking bemusedly after him.

The sun was already below the horizon. He stared and stared across the grand harbour into the fast-gathering gloom, cursing himself. How could he forget? But it was too dark. He could not see.

Yet others walking the twilight streets of Birgu saw the young girl in the pale blue dress in the dusk, the daughter of Franco Briffa, down below the fort of San Angelo, looking out over the water, without a chaperone and her face unveiled. Escandaloso! And she was singing an old song:

‘Come no musket, come no blade,

Come no steel and come no flame,

Through the gun smoke flies the dove,

And you will be my own true love …’

They had just enough strength to eat some bread and a little more salt meat, drink more wine and water and crawl onto their blankets. They were hardly lain flat before exhaustion took them.

It seemed only a few minutes later that Nicholas awoke to a soldier’s cry. He had been dreaming of sword blades and his sister Susan dying in his arms, and he awoke to think he was in a dark church, and Christ was looking over him. Yet his sleepless exhaustion soon gave way to new heart-pounding fear as he heard more and more soldiers’ cries, and running feet, and then the renewed boom of guns.

No, no, not again, for pity …

He and Hodge struggled upright.

‘I can’t take much more of this,’ said Hodge.

Nicholas shook his head. ‘Neither can I.’ He rested his hand on Hodge’s shoulder. Hodge was trembling. ‘Are you well?’

‘Aye,’ said Hodge. ‘Just weary.’

His face was pale and pearled with sweat.

‘Come then,’ said Nicholas.

Hodge put on his breastplate for him and they reeled out under the starlit sky and made for the steps.

It was not yet midnight and they had slept for barely two hours and their every muscle ached, their heads throbbed with tiredness, and now they would have to fight again for many more hours, against odds of three or four hundred to one. In a battle they could not hope to win, only lose as fiercely as possible.