The Great Siege

8

The death of Bridier affected them all deeply, for in it they saw the longed-for type and template of their own. Already their numbers were deeply winnowed. Whatever they did cost lives, whether they counter-attacked, fell back, dug in. De Guaras was sorely wounded to the head, and wore a bandage tight around his temples, deep dyed. Smith was badly hurt though he denied it angrily, still unable to rise from his pallet. Bridier was dead, Lanfreducci’s arm wound was not healing well, though he hid it as best he could.

The one shred of good news for Nicholas was when Hodge suddenly appeared at his side. He looked very pale, but not fevered. His injured left arm was in a thick stiff plastercast made of cotton bandages and white clay.

‘What … How fare you?’

‘Alive,’ said Hodge. ‘So it seems.’

‘You’ll not go back to Birgu?’

‘Will you?’

Nicholas shook his head. ‘Not yet.’

‘Then me neither. Bugger Birgu.’

Of the fifty knights, twenty were dead or wounded beyond fighting, and of the one hundred soldiers who supported them with such stubborn and dogged courage, fewer than sixty still stood. They were less than a hundred. Maybe a thousand Turks had died before the walls of Elmo, maybe more. But there remained tens of thousands more.

Yet they fought on. Another day, another night. Another day, and the assault seemed to falter a little, as a bewildered Ottoman high command pulled back to count their losses, and to consider. Day followed night followed day, the days lost their names, the dead piled up, and they fought on. They slept a few minutes at a time, whether light or dark. Small, delicate tasks became difficult, as if their very fingers longed for rest. The buckling on of armour, the reloading of an arquebus took longer and longer. Yet they fought on, more and more exhausted, uncertain even how long they had withstood the army of Suleiman the Magnificent …

In the gathering dark they huddled in the inner courtyard and ate what rations they could of bread and biscuit and salt pork, and drank watered wine. They could hear the distant shouts and orders of the Turkish medical corps, coming forward as darkness fell to rescue the wounded. They did not fire on them.

‘Not out of mercy,’ growled Zacosta. ‘Out of bone tiredness.’

‘He hates those Mohammedan dogs,’ said García, jerking his head at his comrade. ‘They raped his sister.’

Nicholas looked horrified.

García nodded gravely. ‘They mistook her for a camel.’

Zacosta gave him a thump.

These soldiers’ humour took some getting used to. Yet perhaps it was the best defence against despair.

And then in the midst of their laughter, another of the soldiers came running from the south wall to say a longboat was coming in below Elmo. Perhaps a messenger from La Valette, it was hard to see in the moonless night. The Turks could not seal off the crossing from Birgu to Elmo even now. They couldn’t seal off the Grand Harbour without first taking Elmo. And after ten days — ten days — against all expectation, they still couldn’t take Elmo. The paradox was becoming agonising.

A second soldier came panting into the courtyard. His face gleamed in the firelight, his eyes danced. Nicholas held his breath. Relief forces from Sicily?

‘Speak, damn you,’ said Zacosta.

‘Our brothers have come out to us,’ said the soldier. ‘Fifty or more reinforcements!’

All of them, soldiers and knights, dashed to the south wall and looked down, and their hearts swelled in their chests. Climbing up the steep rocky coast beneath the walls of the fort, unseen by any Turks, was a column of fifty, perhaps sixty more veteran tercios. They trod softly, their boots bandaged in cloth, every inch of steel about them dulled with mud.

‘God be praised,’ breathed Stanley.

‘And La Valette,’ said De Guaras. ‘He has not abandoned us yet.’

They hurried to open the gates.

Although the reinforcements might seem pitifully few, when faced with an army of thousands, none of them felt that way. Instead a newly indomitable spirit stirred within them, steeled once more for the fight. Perhaps it was La Valette’s plan, for the Turks to waste themselves and bleed away bewildered before this wretched little fort, while Elmo itself was constantly resupplied from Birgu under cover of darkness, without the Turks even knowing. If so, it showed masterful tactics.

The fresh troop of soldiers were led by the powerful Captain Miranda himself, and had been guided across by a local fisherman: Luqa Briffa, the celebrated scoundrel, the greatest swimmer of the island, suspected ‘liberator’ of various jewels and costly trinkets from the houses of the Maltese nobility in Mdina, and older brother of Franco Briffa himself.

Miranda saluted smartly. Broglia returned the salute. ‘By God, you are welcome here, Captain, more welcome than a hundred of the most beautiful courtesans in Venice.’

‘We fight better too,’ said Miranda dryly.

‘Which is the Inglis, the Insulter?’ demanded the short, bandy-legged, loosely turbanned Luqa Briffa. ‘It is you, is it not?’ He prodded a stubby forefinger in Nicholas’s chest. The boy nodded. ‘My brother sends greetings, and his good wife. He says God bless you and keep you. You are a crusader for the island. He prays you come home.’

Nicholas smiled forlornly. Sick and dizzy with tiredness, muzzy with opium and wine yet his parched gullet still sore, his mind still full of pictures of atrocity from the past days, made bearable only by those rare, brief lightbeams of heroism he had seen … he felt like no crusader. He felt like an unwashed, exhausted fugitive wretch and exile, trapped here in a war to the death with an enemy never to be defeated. Yet it was good to hear of the family across the water, and good to see the grimly determined tercios come to join them.

‘You also have a cake,’ said Luqa Briffa. And to general surprise, he brought out a small, beautiful white cake wrapped in a clean white cloth.

‘Cake,’ said Stanley close by. ‘Just what we need most. Not musket balls, powder, medicines or bandages. Our greatest need is for cake.’

Luqa Briffa shrugged. ‘This is not my brother. If Franco bake a cake, it come out looking like a donkey’s pat, and tasting much the same. This is baked by his daughter, my niece. Maddalena. For you, Inglis.’ He eyed Nicholas sternly under his bushy eyebrows. ‘Especially for you. Yes?’

‘Yes.’

‘You understand?’

‘Yes.’ He could think of nothing to add except, ‘Thank you. Say thank you.’

Stanley said, ‘Tell us some good news, Captain.’

‘The news,’ said Miranda, ‘like life itself, is good and bad. The Spanish relief force for Malta is now being fitted out in earnest, in Barcelona. But meanwhile another relief force, ready to sail, is being held up by rough seas in Genoa.’

‘That is reasonable,’ said a hoarse voice nearby. It was Smith, on his feet again, quite expressionless, using a broken pikestaff for a crutch. His neck wound was making him feverish, dizzy, and he swayed abominably without support.

‘For all the saints,’ muttered Stanley, trying to look annoyed and failing, ‘is there no putting the man down?’

Smith went on, ‘It is reasonable that our comrades in Genoa should not wish to come and fight beside us, for fear they might feel a touch queasy on the sea crossing. That is understandable. They should wait for seas as smooth as glass. We are happy to fight on here without them, outnumbered as we are by a mere four hundred to one. We will be pleased to see them when they can finally make it over.’

The sarcasm was hardly subtle, but the tercios guffawed. Zacosta slapped the knight on the back, impertinently. They had taken to this gruff blackbearded Englishman like one of their own.

Luqa Briffa was heading for the gates. ‘As for me, I go back. What more can I say? You are men among men. You are as stout as Maltese. There, there is a blessing. May Christ and the Virgin watch over you, St Michael and all angels fight for you.’

From the rocks below the south-east point, scrambling down to his fellow rowers in the longboat, he called back, ‘Enjoy the cake!’

Nicholas passed it round. It was very fine, filled with almonds and honey.

‘And made with love,’ joked García.

Nicholas flushed, looking down.

Behind him, Stanley touched García on the shoulder, to silence his mockery. He said no more.

When they had eaten, many fell asleep where they sat. For the first time in days they felt some contentment, some hope. Another fifty fresh men on the walls tomorrow would tell significantly. They would fight on, good for another week perhaps. Then maybe they would never eat cake again, never taste honey. Some thought they would never taste a woman’s lips or lie between a woman’s thighs again. Some thought in silence of far families. All prayed. Even García and Zacosta prayed, to whatever God made sense to them.

The mood was different in the pavilion of Mustafa Pasha.

He said to Işak Agha, ‘Why have you not taken it?’

Işak looked riven with shame. ‘They are few, Pasha, but they fight like lions.’

‘And the Janizaries fight like, what? Like women? Like girls? Like lambs?’

Işak Agha bowed his head.

Suddenly Mustafa’s infamous, furious rage rose up in him. He strode towards Işak Agha, almost into him, put his hands around the Agha’s throat and shook him, raging, ‘Tomorrow is the eleventh day. The eleventh. And still not a single Janizary has stood inside that fort, even to die there like a hero. Take it! Allah damn you and your seed and your family for ever, if you do not soon take that accursed pox-ridden Christian nest of snakes!’

Işak had his hands on Mustafa’s hands, his eyes bulging, the words squeezed dry in his throat.

Mustafa raged, ‘For more than a week now that cesspit of a fort has stood against us, the dogs of St John in San Angelo looking on and laughing. Laughing! Have the Janizaries no sense of shame, of dishonour? Two thousand of my men, two thousand …! Shit on them, rip them apart, rip their livers out! Rip their hearts out of their splintered ribs, do you hear me? Kill them! Take that place NOW and KILL THEM ALL!’

And in his fury he hurled the muscular Agha of Janizaries backwards out of his tent as if he were a wrestler of twenty-five.

Smith was on his feet the next day at dawn, his whole neck and throat swollen and sore beneath the linen wrappings, his left arm strangely numb and tingling and stiff to move. But it could clutch his broken pike-crutch well enough, and he swung his right arm, his sword-arm, vigorously, readying for the fight.

Stanley said wonderingly, ‘I have given him enough opium to put a draught horse to sleep.’

‘How?’ said Nicholas. ‘He suspected you. He’d drink nothing that tasted of opium.’

‘I had one of the chaplains steep his fresh bandage in opium and brandy. Straight into his blood that way. A slight risk, it might have proved too much.’ Smith was swishing his sword now sharply left and right, parry and thrust. ‘Yet clearly not enough. The man would have outwrestled the angel at the Brook Jabbok that defeated Jacob himself.’

Smith stumped over and glared down at them.

‘What are you two idlers gossiping about, like women at a well? On your feet.’

They stood.

‘Strike me,’ said Stanley, ‘but you’ve a broken fingernail, Fra John.’

Smith stared down. Amid his multiple wounds and bruises, and a lead ball festering in the muscles of his mighty neck, he had indeed broken a fingernail half through, leaving a small scab of blood.

Stanley clucked like a hen. ‘That must sting painfully. You should see a physician.’

Smith growled like a bear and stumped off.

How could they joke like this, with death imminent? wondered Nicholas. Yet he had seen enough jesters going up to the gallows in Shrewsbury Town. Laughing at death as they went. Perhaps it was the best that man’s wisdom could do.

Will I die? he asked inwardly. Lord, will I die today? Or will I live to see England again? My sisters? Even my estate restored?

The answer came as usual. A silence, filled with a presence, and with wordless consolation.

Minutes later a cry went up from the bastion. A new flag was flying on the lookout of San Angelo.

Many rushed to the top, straining to see, desperate for the rapturous sight of the black, two-headed eagle on a yellow ground: the standard of Christian Spain, showing that the longed-for relief of King Philip had come.

The flag showed a ship and a lightning bolt.

‘The banner of Saint Elmo,’ said Lanfreducci.

Stanley stared and then said, ‘They are telling us it is the Feast Day of Saint Elmo.’

Neither knight allowed a hint of disappointment in his voice.

Stanley stared around. ‘June 3rd.’

Eleven days.

The Turks were moving guns about busily, carefully. They were not attacking yet. Everything suggested absolute determination to finish this. When they came in, it would be very hard.

Commander Luigi Broglia moved about busily too, as yet unwounded, marshalling soldiers and guns, an energetic and expert leader of men. At last the eight-barrelled organ gun had been made serviceable, a small-bore field gun that nevertheless wreaked bloody attrition on close-packed men. He set it low on the bastion, ready served.

Even among the dark pools of dried blood, the mangled bodies dragged into shade and roughly covered with sacking for decency, and the severed limbs, discreetly gathered up by the medical chaplains, Broglia retained his optimism.

‘I admire good spirits in a man,’ said Smith. ‘But Commander Broglia, do you not think there comes a time when sunny optimism, in certain circumstances, can seem like nothing but sunstruck lunacy?’

Both ducked as a cannonball whistled in. An initial ranging shot, but a good one. It struck the parapet of the south wall and sent splinters flying. They would be coming soon. Smith held his sword unsheathed.

Broglia grinned. ‘Ah, Fra Gianni Smit! Come come, my morose and melancholy English Brother, be of stout heart! And I will be of stout belly, though I fear it is diminishing daily on our paltry rations.’

There was something grotesque about Broglia’s high spirits amid the strewn limbs, the sun-crusted pools of blood, the flies sipping and fattening at their margins, and worst of all, the ubiquitous, slaughterhouse stench rising from the moat beyond. Yet Smith couldn’t help but smile likewise, revealing a split gum and a gap where yesterday two teeth had been.

‘Ecco!’ cried Luigi Broglia. ‘Just so! Coraggio e Allegrezza, Courage and Jollity, the ancient motto of the Broglia family, ever since I made it up five seconds ago!’

Smith went up to the north-west cordon. A soldier was just lugging a fresh earth-filled gabion onto the pile, heaping it as high as a man’s head, when a single shot rang out and he fell back. Shot clean through the heart. Behind their breastworks, fresh and well slept, handsomely breakfasted and full of confidence, with limitless supplies of powder and balls at their disposal, the Ottoman snipers were working.

Cursing, Smith clambered up after him to bring him down where he sprawled.

‘Brother!’ cried out Stanley. For the soldier he had gone to rescue was dead already.

Then a second shot rang out — timed with ruthless perfection — and it hit Smith sidelong the moment he was exposed, by damnable luck at the join of breastplate and backplate, passing clean through and slicing up into his belly. He fell back, clutching himself, exhaling hoarsely.

‘No!’ cried Stanley, coming at the run.

Not even Smith could take such a second wound. He lay in Stanley’s arms. ‘Brother, my brother,’ he murmured, his eyes closing. ‘’Fore God, I am undone.’