The Great Siege

7

From San Angelo, La Valette and Starkey looked out at the beleaguered fort, silently smoking in the night.

‘The banner of St John flies yet,’ said Starkey, ‘though they have fought there two days and two nights.’

‘And will be fighting all tomorrow too, no doubt of that,’ said La Valette. ‘Against entirely fresh troops. But they have withstood well so far, and Birgu is grateful for it. Not a minute has been wasted.’

In a courtyard in a quiet backstreet, a mother said to her daughter, ‘What is it, child?’

The girl said nothing.

‘Is it the English boy?’

Then tears came to the girl’s eyes, and she stood and ran into an inner room.

‘You know it is the English boy,’ said Franco Briffa, throwing another wad of dried brush in the brazier. ‘Leave her be.’

The woman bent over her sewing again. ‘How it hurts to be young and in love.’

‘Love,’ sighed Franco. ‘Ay, I remember that word. But as to its meaning …’

His wife smiled in the firelight and pricked him in the leg with her needle. Franco chuckled.

The Turks fell on Elmo again the next day, and the defenders fought from dawn till dusk, and then the next. The high confidence of the first day and the blistering counter-attack began to wane. In their weariness they began to make misjudgements, and Smith stood to move along the line just as new gunfire poured in upon them at close range.

He was struck in his broad bullneck by a musket ball. He fought on, blood slowly drenching his throat and shoulder, before he suddenly weakened and tottered, and then said with great dignity, ‘Brothers, I must leave you,’ and went below.

Stanley rammed a fresh musketball home with vehemence. ‘He’ll live,’ he said. It sounded as much a prayer as a prediction.

Nicholas glanced after Smith, Sir John Smith, the indestructible, knight of both England and Malta … And Hodge, too, was not well. He drank excessively, and ate little, and looked wan, and struggled to bring the smallest sacks of powder and ball up the steps to the walls. But Nicholas would not let Hodge die. He had decided that they would fight the good fight as long as they could, but then somehow make their way back across the water before Elmo fell, to Birgu, alive, to fight again.

Men’s plans are not God’s plans.

Hodge dropped down beside Nicholas with a grunt, the sack of balls hitting the ground and the dull leaden spheres rolling away over the stone.

‘For God’s sake boy, pick ’em up!’ roared a nearby soldier.

But Hodge could not. He lay back sickly, lips thin and drawn, eyes barely open, trembling. Nicholas scrabbled around gathering up the musket balls again and passed them up to the soldier on the wall. He ducked as another explosion went off overhead, and more masonry tumbled down and hit the yard below.

‘Master,’ whispered Hodge, ‘I am going.’

‘I’m not your master, Hodge,’ said Nicholas fiercely. ‘Master no more. And you’re not dying. You’re fevered, and tonight you will go-’

‘Fevered and hit too,’ said Hodge. He moved his left arm slightly across the stones, and it was limp, and left a slather of blood in the dust.

Nicholas in dismay sliced open Hodge’s sleeve and saw the horrible sight of a white splintered arm bone gouging up through the torn flesh of his forearm, the flesh around it blown clean away, more white bone showing, and blood leaking everywhere.

‘O sweet Jesus, sweet Jesus, look down …’ gabbled Nicholas, tearing off the band of cloth around his head that kept the sweat from his eyes and trying to slip it under Hodge’s shattered arm. Exhausted and near delirious as he was, Hodge arched his back at the merest touch of the material and screamed. Nicholas felt the agony, his very arm throbbed in unison. And the worst thing, panic began to set in.

The soldier above them gave a grunt and stepped back, the soldier to whom he had given the fresh bag of musket balls. Then he fell across them and crashed down. He was already dead, half his head gone, his helmet rolling clumsily away across the parapet and over the edge. Another man was screaming with madness, and there were more shouts of sheer desperation,

‘They’re coming in! We can’t hold them!’

Nicholas held onto Hodge’s other hand, stricken helpless. A shadow fell across him from behind, and he knew it was a Turk up on the cordon, yet even then he could not look round. Smoke and dust blinded his eyes, his eyeballs stung with grit, his ears were stunned and deaf, his throat like sharkskin as it had been for days now. Yet he could not look up, could not move, and the cries of despair around him seemed even now very far away. There was only him kneeling there in the dust below the half-shattered parapet, and Hodge lying before him, near dying, to be buried here in this stone-hard fly-blown island, forgotten and far from home.

‘O sweet Jesus … ’

Then two more Spanish infantrymen were fighting behind him. It was García and Zacosta, thrusting over the cordon with fantastic savagery, their half-pikes dripping, and there was another man kneeling beside the boys, keeping his head low. It was Lanfreducci. You beg of Jesus, and a mortal man comes. But that is how Jesus answers. With practised skill he held Hodge’s shoulder in one hand, and then swiftly but gently drew his hand up and across, ignoring the boy’s cries, so that the shattered forearm lay across Hodge’s own belly. Then he scooped Hodge up in strong arms, keeping him prone and motionless, and carried him down to the stores for the chaplains to tend. They were so low on medical supplies, they were splinting with scabbards now.

Nicholas ran down after them. His every desire was to go with Hodge, sit with him, be with him. But that was worthless, and not his duty. He was urgently needed on the walls. He seized more bags and powder packs and ran up the steps once more. Sweat immediately began to pour into his eyes again in the atrocious heat, salt to sting his cracked and sunburned face. The sun was a living fire, but it punished all equally. He paused half-way up to tie the cloth around his forehead again, for without it he could barely see to crawl along behind the cordon, handing out the bags and packs.

Behind him came another knight up the steps, his throat wrapped tight with a white bandage, limping badly, his face deathly pale. The rest of his wounds and his half-destroyed body were hidden by his fine suit of armour. He raised his vizor and smiled at Nicholas above him. It was Bridier de la Gordcamp.

‘Brother!’ called one of the chaplains from the yard. ‘You cannot-’

Bridier raised his hand without turning. ‘Later, brother, later.’

The situation on the walls was desperate. The Janizaries were pushing with vast concerted force now to finish this damned fort and be done, knowing that the defenders had been fighting for close on seventy-two hours, with barely a rest. That lunatic counter-attack of theirs must have boosted their morale, yet still they must be near finished.

The heat was terrible, and while they in their white silk robes had it better, the Christians in their suits of armour must surely be dropping of suffocation and thirst if nothing else. A quarter of them were dead already, and the rest must surely be destroyed soon. And yet those dogs of St John fought on, like men who did not know when their appointed time was come.

Not twenty men stood behind the north-west cordon, locked in struggle with the packed Janizary assault. Though distant Turkish snipers might try to pick off isolated defenders, yet guns were in the main useless in this mêlée of swords and half-pikes, deteriorating into the crudest blows with shield boss or butt in the face with armoured head.

Through the ranks of the soldiers and his brother knights, not one of them unwounded, slipped the slender Bridier. He stepped up onto the cordon of barrels and bales, drew his sword and cried out the name of the Saviour. Then before the astonished eyes of all, attackers and defenders both, he flipped his grilled vizor down, dropped in among the Janizaries themselves and began slaying.

For a moment it seemed like he was a man enchanted, or a demon come from below. His armour was of the very finest, of the workshops of Brescia, and even the most powerful cuts and thrusts made no headway against him, while his own long lean blade sliced cruelly through Turkish flesh without ceasing. The attack began to fail, some Turks fell away, some retreated. Then a veteran Janizary sergeant aimed grimly and stabbed the point of his scimitar straight at the exposed underarm of the fair-haired knight and drove it in deep.

Bridier pulled himself back from the scimitar and swung his sword and missed and staggered and fell. Janizaries crowded vengefully forward, but from the roof of the bastion came a command to his own men to duck down, and then a perfectly timed volley of crossbow bolts under Luigi Broglia’s all-seeing direction. They flew in hard and hit the close-packed Turkish soldiery while the prostrate Bridier lay safe below them. Half a dozen more Turks fell. In the pause, Bridier climbed to his feet again, leaning on his sword, and then raised it once more, beyond exhausted, just enough to drive it low into the sergeant’s belly. The Turk leaned forward and vomited blood over the weapon that had killed him. Bridier pulled his sword free and sank to his knees. The sergeant knelt with him, facing him. They appeared like men confessing their last sins to each other.

But it was enough. The drum retreat had already sounded. The Janizary captain across the ditch saw that his sergeant was dead and order among his men once more lost. The shattered, exposed, bitterly contested star point was once more abandoned, and the damned fort of Elmo lived to breathe another hour.

The knights at the barrier cheered their brother Bridier, but the older knights looked grave as they cheered, knowing he must now be wounded to death.

Nicholas wanted to run out to him and help him in, but he froze. With implacable calm, beyond the ditch and safely behind a forward breastwork, half a dozen Janizary marksmen were now taking aim on the lone, broken knight, standing isolated out beyond the defensive cordon.

Bridier turned and walked slowly back towards the heaped barrier of barrels and gabions and stone blocks, his vizor raised, his head hung down, his long girlish locks plastered to his pale cheeks. He could no longer lift his sword enough to sheathe it. Its point dragged in the dust behind him.

‘Run, brother, run!’ cried his comrades.

The marksmen took aim at his back, not forty paces off.

Knights began to climb up onto the cordon to dash to his rescue. But that was precisely what the Janizary captain had foreseen. Such foolish nobility in those Christian dogs. Yet such nobility, a true Muslim might yet admire it, even though it must be destroyed. He dropped his arm, and his marksmen’s muskets cracked out a hard unwavering volley.

Two of the marksmen had aimed at the cordon iself, and their shots smacked into the gabions and the stones and sent chips flying amid the whine of ricochet. The knights ducked down.

The other four marksmen had aimed for Bridier’s heart.

The young French knight, almost the last flower of a thousand years of Frankish chivalry, barely twenty years of age and beautiful still like a boy, took a staggering step forward. Then with great effort he raised his head and gave his brothers a sad smile and they knew he had already been shot several times and enough had gone through his armour to kill him.

They could hear the Janizary captain’s cry clear across the field. Shoot him down! Shoot him down! This enchanted one could not be allowed to live.

A different shot rang out, and Nicholas turned his head sharply. It was Smith’s jezail, but Stanley taking the shot, putting one of those precious lethal stuardes straight through the Janizaries’ forward breastwork, to their astonished horror, and sending one of their invaluable highly-trained marksmen staggering back and dropping in the dust, clutching his belly.

The momentary confusion among the other marksmen was enough for Bridier to be brought home, arms reaching out for him, half lifting, half dragging him over the broad cordon to safety. An arrow clanged off Stanley’s plated arm even as he dropped back, laid the jezail down and drew off Bridier’s helmet.

The young knight breathed with deep pain. Blood dappled his face and ran from his ears and a thin trickle from the corner of his mouth. By God’s grace alone did he still breathe at all. His sword lay at his side and still he wore that serene saint’s smile.

‘I am struck very near the heart, I think,’ he whispered.

Stanley said, ‘It’s a mighty heart.’

‘Leave me be. Prepare to fight again.’

Then the burly Chevalier de Guaras said, in the old-fashioned idiom, as seemed only right before this unearthly knight from out of the old tales and chronicles, ‘By the fair fame of France I shall not quit you.’ And he pulled him upright.

Bridier de la Gordcamp looked at the thin English boy who knelt in the dust nearby, and perhaps saw something of himself there in that young, torn, passionate face.

‘Here, boy,’ he said weakly. ‘Take my sword, guard it. Bring it to me in the evening.’

Nicholas took up the fine long sword.

‘God bless you, little brother,’ murmured Bridier.

Then De Guaras took him on his shoulder and carried him below.

The crude, four-bed hospital was filled with the wounded and dying, the air filled with their groans. Flies buzzed expectantly, and the stench was terrible. Smith, his neck bandaged, lay on his side on a pallet on the floor, and breathed badly.

‘Leave me here at the door,’ said Bridier.

De Guaras ignored him. ‘In the name of pity, see to our brother.’

The chaplain did not even turn, and his arms were red to the elbows. Another knight bucked underneath him as he tried to draw free an arrowhead from his guts, the cavity of his abdomen welling out blood. ‘As soon as I can.’

‘Now!’ shouted De Guaras. ‘This brother of ours, this hero-’

Only then did the chaplain glance back over his shoulder. It was the imperturbable Fra Giacomo. ‘All heroes here, brother. Do not shout, not even in this extremity.’

Bridier clutched De Guaras about his thick wrists. ‘I sit and sun myself here, Fra Melchior, and bide my time. Now go and fight for the faith.’

How they fought through a fourth afternoon under that burning sun, they hardly understood nor remembered. Many were wounded, and more fell not to rise again. Yet still the Turks could not break in. Towards evening the attack faltered, and finally the mournful blast of the Ottoman curved battle-horn sounded over the wreckage of the field, and the Janizaries pulled back. From now on into night, they would fire only from a distance, sniper and cannon.

‘We will bring up field guns and blast that wretched cordon to pieces across the ditch,’ said Işak, Agha of the Janizaries. ‘It is only a cordon, in the name of the angels. It is only a rough mound of earth and stones that holds us back. It is a disgrace.’

The captain nodded. ‘Yet they rebuild it every time.’

The Agha refused to hear. ‘Then at dawn the infantrymen will go in again, and surely they will finish it.’

Nicholas drew out Bridier’s sword from the shadows inside the door of the bastion where he had carefully stowed it, and went down to the hospital.

Inside it was so dark, and his eyes so blinded with glaring day-long sunlight and smoke and dust, that he could see nothing for a long time. Then a throaty voice said, ‘He is not here.’ It was Smith. ‘Bridier. He is gone.’

Nicholas was all confusion. He knelt at Smith’s side. ‘How is it?’

‘I have been better. The ball’s stuck in my throat, and the chirurgeon says’ — he gasped, went on — ‘says, he cannot dig it free without making me bleed like a stuck pig.’

Nicholas felt close to tears. A man like Smith could not die.

‘Stanley keeps trying to dose me with more opium, but I know his game. He thinks to send me to sleep so I can be shipped back over to Birgu and out of the fight. But he’ll not.’

He laid a great hand on Nicholas’s head. It felt like his father’s.

‘But your gallant friend needs to go over, boy.’

‘Hodge!’

Only then did he see the racked, stretched body of his companion through all. Hodge on his back, delirious, drenched in sweat, muttering, eyes roving through the darkness of the roof above. Then Nicholas wept without shame, kneeling at his side. ‘Hodge.’

Hodge did not know him. Hodge knew nothing, but in his fever-dream saw only the woods and hills of Shropshire, the hedgerows white with may.

‘The chaplains in the Sacred Infirmary will mend him,’ said Smith. His voice was thick with pain, his throat with blood and swelling. But he must tell him. ‘You go back too, boy. You return. This will be the last boat. It’ll not come again. Go with Hodge. Your time is done here.’

Nicholas said nothing, bent and kissed Hodge on his burning forehead, prayed that God have mercy on Smith’s soul as he stepped past him, and went out.

He still held Bridier’s sword. Where had he gone? Cast himself off the wall into the sea below? So as not to be a burden to his brothers even in death. The boy stood in a daze. Weak with hunger but sick at eating. A Spaniard infantryman went by him. It was García.

‘You sicken, boy?’

Nicholas shook his head dumbly.

‘Battle sickness. The stench, the flies, the ruin of men’s flesh. Hope bleeding away too. Drink my wine.’

Again he shook his head.

‘Drink it. To show you’re not a damned Mohammedan dog if nothing else.’ García shoved his wine cup to Nicholas’s lips and almost forced it down his throat. It had a bitter tang.

He coughed and swallowed, wiped his mouth and said, ‘There’s opium in it.’

‘Ay. Just enough so you sleep through the night. Else the horrors of your mind will frighten sleep away.’

The drugged wine warmed him and softened something hard and painfully knotted within him.

Barely conscious of his way, he went over to the little chapel of St John, up the three shallow steps. There on the stone lintel was blood. Blood was everywhere. The whole of Elmo was bleeding.

He stood while his eyes adjusted to the darkness of the little chapel. It was empty, and blissfully cool. He approached the high hanging crucifix over the altar. The stones beneath his feet were slathered in blood. In his exhausted delirium he thought it was Christ’s blood, streaming down from the crucifix, to cleanse Elmo and all the word of its manifold and numberless sins.

A figure lay at the foot of the cross, motionless, suited in armour. His hands were clasped in prayer.

It was Bridier.

Nicholas knelt by his side. He would have wept, but he was beyond tears. He laid his bare hand on the fallen knight’s breastplate, like the rest of his armour dented and dusty and cracked and half ruined. What blows it had taken. At last the steel was cooling, after the hot fury of battle and the Mediterranean sun. Bridier’s cheek too was cold, alabaster-cold to the touch. He scraped back the plastered hair from his cheek. His eyes were still open, but the light was out in them and the soul was gone. Very gently Nicholas drew down first one eyelid and then the other with the trace of a forefinger and Bridier slept in the arms of God. Never had he seen an expression so at peace.

With his very last strength he must have left the field hospital and crawled into the chapel, unseen by any. He had crawled up the aisle to the foot of the cross, dragging himself with his bare hands, his blood shining behind him on the stones. Neither wine nor opium for him. Only the wine of faith, the opium of the divine. His life was done, only his soul mattered now. Here he had made his last confession, begged for God’s mercy on his sinful soul, and quietly died.

Nicholas laid Bridier’s sword down beside his lifeless body. Untenanted flesh. All flesh is grass.

Someone came into the chapel. It was Edward Stanley.

‘That is of no use to him now,’ he said gently. ‘No swords where he has gone.’

Nicholas stared dumbly down. He was so tired.

Stanley said that the Chevalier Bridier de la Gordcamp had had the tranquillity of a great soul, a noble heart. Such a man never loses his temper or becomes angry, not even in the heat of battle. He is only an instrument in the hands of God, a feather on the breath of God, and he accepts everything appointed for him as God’s will.

‘Our brother Bridier died on the fourth day,’ he said. ‘Yet Christ rose again from the dead on the third day, in glorious foreshadowing. Or rather, the precedent light to this shadow. There is a pattern to everything. Now take up his sword.’

Stanley himself took up the body of the knight, and walked away down the aisle.

He laid him in a side room of the cluttered, fly-blown chamber that served for a hospital, where the chaplains would do their best amid the attacks and the explosions to wash him down and scent him and wrap him in linen cloths in the hope that he and all the dead might yet have a decent and Christian burial. Deo volente. Then Stanley removed Bridier’s armour, piece by battered piece, inspecting it closely. At last he passed Nicholas his helmet, his two arm vambraces and mailed gauntlets, and his sword-belt and scabbard.

‘I am to fight?’

‘No. You are exhausted.’

‘We are all exhausted. You know I fight well, how fast I am.’

‘You may need to fight to save your life soon. But now you are returning to Birgu with Hodge and my brother John.’

Nicholas bit his lip.

‘Yet this armour may save you. It is meant. Bridier had your frame to an uncanny degree. And he gave you his sword.’

‘Only to guard till evening.’

‘No. He knew he was dying. He meant you to have it.’

Nicholas eyed the edges, badly toothed and dented.

‘Find a whetstone, do what you can to the edge. Wear it with pride.’ He smiled a soft smile, his eyes shining with a proud sorrow. ‘I do not need to tell you to be worthy of it. You are worthy already.’