The Great Siege

11

The sea erupted more and more. The boy curved and dived down like a dolphin. There were twenty, thirty musketeers trying to hit him at no more than a hundred and fifty paces now. A hundred and twenty. It was a crazy waste of powder and ball, but a captain, and then Işak Agha himself, had taken command. Dragut’s word was plain. Kill him.

The cursed Christian swimmer swam on, though it was like swimming through hail now, where every hailstone was a lead bullet that could take your head off.

Eventually in exasperation, Dragut himself came thundering down on his white charger to the headland above Is-Salvatur. He dropped from his horse and strode down to the hapless battery, his voice like the cannon’s roar. He had not even troubled to don armour or a helmet. There was no time. That damned swimmer must be stopped.

His lungs were in agony, his arms would barely rise and pull again, and yet he continued. There was no other way. Already he had registered two fresh things, both bad. How long did a dead man float? Not long. The body of Paolo was already gone below. He had hoped to use it as a shield while he paused, trod water, took fresh lungfuls of air. Perhaps even drag it along through the water with him, keeping low behind it. It would have been horrible, a kind of grim sacrilege, the poor brave fisherman’s body steadily shredded by incoming musket fire, his corpse at last dragged up onto the rocks below Elmo like a flayed and bloody sandbag. Yet it might have saved him. But Paolo’s body was gone below. Like his soul, it was already departed into another silent world, unimaginable to men.

But there was worse. Out to sea beyond Gallows Point, he had glimpsed over the blinding sparkle of the water, a small low Turkish patrol boat coming in. It had seen what was happening and understood, and was racing in to cut him off and kill him in the water, in case the efforts of the musketeers failed. And he could not outswim what looked like a four- or six-man galliot.

Yet he swam on. He could see the rocks below Elmo, the heaped and tumbled sandstone boulders, and he knew exactly which outcrop he must reach to be round the corner from the battery of Is-Salvatur. He must not lose concentration, he must mind his breathing, and he must swim below the surface often, pulling himself down, two feet below, five feet, breathing out to let himself sink though the heavy saltwater, so much heavier than the fresh flowing waters of his native Severn.

Then he must come up and take breath, his lungs burning, in air that exploded around him. Soon the Janizary marksmen would get the rhythm of his descent and rise again, and they would be ready for him, so he must break his rhythm, and he must try to stay down as long as possible.

Now he must come up, and when he opened his mouth there was a gout of water that dashed in his face. A ball had struck the surface of the sea six inches in front of him. He took another deep breath and sank down. He was so tired, and his heart hammered in terror beneath his ribs. He could swim no further, yet he could not stay under either, nor curve out of range to sea, for there the lean galley was coming in like a shark.

Something seethed in the water to his left and his elbow sang in sudden agony. He rolled and looked down and there was blood spiralling round his left arm. He had been hit, and his uncertainty as to how far through water a musket ball might go had been answered. Far enough.

The low galley was very near now. A man stood in the prow, naked but for a loincloth, a Barbary corsair, teeth showing in a grin, holding a forked weapon you might use to spear tuna.

Nicholas raised his left arm and there was no strength in it. The elbow felt smashed. He could have cried out for mercy, but the sharpshooters on the spit were not men to give mercy, nor the man who commanded them, nor, least of all, the coming corsairs. No mercy to this impertinent wretch in the water, swimming doggedly on before the eyes of all the citizens of Birgu.

His lungs were screaming at him now and he came up again. The Turks knew exactly where he was heading, and at what pace. He rolled and tried to get just his face, his mouth, above water, and his lungs exploded out and then sucked in again. He took two more breaths and he heard the crack, but it was too late. By the time he heard it the balls had already struck. Yet by some miracle none hit him, and he thought that there would be a few seconds while the next guns were passed to the marksmen and they could fire again, enough for two deep breaths, he thought, no, three. He forced the air out of his lungs and in and out and in, he thought of bellows, his head was dizzy, the blood pumped with sudden air, the vessels in his head throbbed, and then he sank below the water as it hissed in white trails above him. Perhaps one tickled through his hair, he couldn’t be sure, and that was the next volley. Now he could swim another ten underwater strokes again, perhaps more, before he needed air. Yet his arm hurt abominably. He didn’t look down. Occasionally he saw from the corner of his salt-stung eyes a trail of blood in the blue sea, but he did not want to see. Not a wound like Hodge’s, please Christ, a white shard of shattered bone jutting out through his water-whitened flesh.

He came up again to the brilliant sun and the blue sky, his cheeks blowing out with the pressure of air rushing to escape his lungs, and then sank to see the deep cobalt-blue abyss below him. Little bright-coloured fish darted about, and below that, hundreds and hundreds of feet down, miles down, a dizzying nothing. Nothing but that deep blue abyss over which he floated like a mere speck of flesh.

He rose to the surface with his hair plastered over his face and scooped it away. There was the lean shadow of the narrow rowing galley almost upon him, cutting straight over him, and the lean naked corsair raising his forked spear to strike.

He gulped in air and dragged himself down and the big shadow passed over him. He was blinded with the surge of bubbles it dragged up through the water, yet he reached out and his right hand caught the slender keel. He gripped it with all his might and was wrenched through the water with it. Then the boat slowed and stopped.

The Janizary gunmen on the shore ceased their shooting. Dragut yelled out in fury. They could not fire and hit one of their own.

In the shadowed darkness beneath the boat, clutching the keel, his lungs burning and the light of his conscious mind failing, Nicholas saw that forked fishing spear stabbing down again and again into the water all around the boat. He saw the light green ripples, and the sun itself, a scribble of burning light through the water above him. His lungs would tear open in his chest, his gorge felt swollen with air, he would not have the strength to do anything, and if he came up they would kill him. For men like these, killing him was like killing a fish.

Yet he must come up, wounded as he was. He must try and take one of them with him at least, though it was not the end he had hoped for. With his very last strength he clawed his way through the dark water to the rear of the boat, some twenty feet in length, and with the last shred of his discipline, he rose to the bright surface as slowly as he could, to break through it in near silence. He lay back with his face just above the surface, exhaled and inhaled with agonising slowness, aware of nothing else, expecting to feel the searing stab of the forked spear at any moment. Nothing. He pulled upright and turned his eyes away from the sun and opened them.

He trod water behind the stern. In the boat above, none looked down upon him. They looked over the sides, the bow. The water cleared from his ears and the air was filled with noisy chatter, angry shouts. More angry calls over the water from Is-Salvatur, and always in the background, the grim, ceaseless music of the Elmo guns. Their noise had covered him.

He could turn and swim on unnoticed. He turned himself about very slowly, silently in the water. The shore was no more that fifty yards off. He might yet do it.

There was a sound above his head. He glanced back and up, and a naked corsair was standing in the stern, towering over him, face dark-shadowed but visibly grinning, and stabbing a long-handled, narrow-tined fishing spear down into his upturned face.

He thrashed violently and somehow the forks missed him. When the corsair pulled his spear back to stab again, he found he could not. The boy had seized hold of the shaft. The corsair gripped tight, and Nicholas, the pain in his elbow dulled and distant in his surge of fighting fury, curled himself up in the water and planted his bare feet against the flat stern-board and pulled himself up on the spear. He rolled in over the stern, crashing into the corsair’s legs, and they both sprawled to the floor of the boat.

The bright sun and the upper air were like the taste of resurrection to him, and that inner fury and that uncanny speed again possessed him. In the time the lean young corsair took to leap nimbly to his feet, the leaner boy had snatched up the spear and flipped it round and driven the twin nine-inch prongs deep into his chest and then kicked him overboard to die.

There were five other men in the galley, two still on the rowing bench, staring at him. He moved forward and drove the fishing fork in long clean strokes deep into their chests, one, two, pulled it out, stabbed them again in the neck, and then as they slumped down he jumped up onto their prostrate bodies, his feet bare on their flesh.

On Is-Salvatur, the marksmen sighted down the lengths of their barrels and saw the dancing figure against the darkening sky and waited for the order to fire anyway and finish this farce. A single raking volley would kill them all. Dragut ordered the culverin hurriedly reloaded.

Flailing and thrusting with the long forked fishing spear, Nicholas fell on the last three men who were still gaping in amazement at this creature in human form that swam beneath the water, and erupted from it like a flying fish. The men of Barbary knew every island and inlet of the Western Mediterranean, but like most fishermen of Malta, they did not swim. It was an unholy mystery to them.

They were only lightly armed with daggers, one fumbling with a pole, and with his quick dancing movements, his lightning thrusts, Nicholas had stabbed all three of them before they fled this crazed idolater come from the deep, and threw themselves into the water, there to thrash and scream and perhaps drown.

He had despatched six men in under a minute. From Is-Salvatur, Dragut stared out. What in hell was this thin white djinn?

Even as he was driving the last of the corsairs into the water, Nicholas heard a volley of musket fire and the bellow of culverin. It was not finished yet.

He heard a harsh voice — it was Dragut — ordering the culverin reloaded fast. One of the gunners said the barrel was heating up, but Dragut struck him a mighty blow across the face, and he got to reloading.

He might shelter behind the boat, but there he was trapped, and the culverin would soon blast it in pieces. He could not row it alone. There was nothing else. He must swim again. But it was with a savage elation that he flung the fishing spear high into the air towards Is-Salvatur, like a javelin, then ran the length of the galliot and hurled himself off the prowboard and cut into the water. He felt invincible as he ploughed on, the sheltering rocks below Elmo only forty strokes away now.

Then something hit his head. It was like he had been cuffed. He saw blackness, and then blackness starred with pinpricks. He slowed and stopped. There were cries about his ears. He wanted to shake his head but it hurt too much. He gasped and sputtered, limbs flailing without control, musket balls sizzling around him. The distant roar of the culverin, followed by a silence and then many anguished cries. He should duck down but he could no longer. His left arm felt useless again. He ducked his head underwater and there was a great cloud of blood. He tried to drag himself onwards with his right arm and kicked his exhausted legs. Face turned into the dying sun, not seeing, blind with salt and inside his head only black space. No longer knowing where he was or who, not even his name. Only the sun beat down, nothing else lived nor would outlive it, not he, not she, there was only death and the sea and the sun.