The Great Siege

12

The overheated culverin had split at the last shot and the ball had erupted at a sharp angle out of the barrel. It sheared into the water not twenty paces off. But as it went, it chipped a sharp blade of stone off a boulder, and the stone flew through the air and struck one of the men at the base of his skull, just beneath the wrappings of his turban.

It was Dragut.

The great corsair commander was stretchered over to the Ottoman field hospital at the Marsa, men jabbering. They said that the gun had overheated, they had worked it too hard and had neither water to cool it nor time to piss on it. The medics said that a stone shard might not be too serious, but Dragut’s eyes were closed, his face sickly pale, and he was beyond speech, his breathing deep and stertorous. When they unwrapped the turban, they found to their horror that the skull had been severally shattered, and a dribble of grey brain was oozing through the fine silk. It was accursed luck that so small an accident should wreak such damage. But it was as Allah willed it.

Three hours later, as the secretary wrote in elaborate Turkish fashion, in the letter that would be hurried back to Suleiman with galley slaves lashed to ribbons all the way, ‘our noble Dragut drank the sweet nectar of martyrdom, and forgot this vain world.’

The nectar of martyrdom did not always look so sweet up close, thought the Ottoman medics, swabbing up his brains.

Nicholas lay on his back in a small room, his head heavily bandaged. He stayed still for a time, trying to gather his thoughts and senses. Then he tried to move his left arm. The elbow felt terribly bruised, but he could move it, and with gritted teeth, flex it a little. It too was bandaged. He moved his right arm, his legs. He breathed deeply.

He had survived. How, he didn’t know. He stared up at the roof of the cool and peaceful Sacred Infirmary. Fra Reynaud was somewhere near, that strong and comforting presence. He gave thanks.

Then the walls, his narrow bed shuddered with a monstrous explosion, and he knew he had been deceiving himself. He was not in the Sacred Infirmary. He was at Elmo. He was back in the hell of Elmo.

Stanley stood by him, bloody and cut about. His head too was bandaged, his left arm was in a sling, a different look in his eyes. There were no more bad jests. There was an edge of anger in his voice when he spoke.

‘You have come back to your death.’

Nicholas was still confused. He could not remember what he had done, or why.

Stanley said, ‘La Valette cannot have sent you.’

‘What I have written, I have written,’ he said incoherently.

‘I cannot believe you came back to us.’

‘To bring the letter,’ said Nicholas, light dawning. ‘Did you find it? How long have I lain here?’

‘We found it. We are now in our sixteenth day of fighting. Or perhaps seventeenth. In truth, I no longer know. Does Smith still live?’

‘When I left, yes. Very sick, though the chaplains can work wonders. But the armies of Spain have come now?’

Stanley’s blue eyes were flat and without hope. ‘Alas,’ he said. ‘No. It may be that hearing of Dragut’s arrival with a fresh army, King Philip has decided to hold back again.’

Nicholas didn’t know whether to laugh or weep. ‘All that struggle, the deaths of the fishermen, for nothing. To bring a false message.’

‘A false message that lifted us up for a time,’ said Stanley. ‘You were not to know.’

Nicholas’s heart thumped with anger. ‘Help must come from Christendom — from Spain, from Venice, the Papal States — after all we have suffered.’

Stanley shook his head. ‘King Philip must look to defend Sicily and Spain afterwards. The armies and navies of Suleiman are greater than those of all Christendom combined. It may be that Malta is only the first chapter in a far longer war.’

‘Then we will be destroyed. And — Birgu.’

‘I cannot say, little brother.’ Stanley’s voice had a crack in it. ‘Truly. But we fight on.’

‘I will fight with you.’

‘Your arm is damaged and your head wound was bad enough when we pulled you from the water.’

‘But I can still fight.’

Stanley could have wept. In all the sorry siege and fall of this island, he doubted if there would be a hero greater than this skinny boy from Shropshire. Blast him for returning.

‘You are your father’s son,’ he said softly.

Another explosion came from above. Stone flaked from the walls, Nicholas closed his eyes, fine sandstone showered down on his upturned face.

‘Rest,’ said Stanley. ‘I must go.’

He lay back and tried to rest. He would be killed in his bed, skewered by some raving Bektaşi. Or enslaved. Or held as a pretty captive by some senior Ottoman. Held in chains, naked, visited daily … Then Birgu would be attacked and taken, and she would suffer the same fate. And this but the first chapter. Smith had said that in capturing Malta, the Turk would acquire the finest natural harbour in the Mediterranean for his Grand Fleet. And Rome itself then lay not four hundred miles away …

One of the chaplains, it was Fra Giacomo, came and gave him water and some bread. He was very hungry, and ate all he gave him. Drank more water, slowly and steadily, until he was full to bursting, then struggled upright and sat on the edge of the pallet. His head throbbed painfully, his eyes didn’t seem right. He named the six planets in order. He counted backwards from twenty to one.

‘You are going to fight?’

He nodded.

‘There are few left. And the dead are no longer shrouded. You will find plenty of armour there.’

It was like a dream to be back at Elmo. Like one of those dreams of being back at school again, studying Latin grammar under the harsh eye of Master Elliott — but a dream of darker hue. In a dream he found himself scuffed boots, a shirt and jerkin, back and breastplate, stripping them from a dead young soldier of his frame, and a close-fitting steel morion that he tugged down over his bandaged head, relieved that but for a dim throbbing at the back of his skull, he felt no pain. His left elbow was damnably stiff where the ball had struck the knuckle bone there, perhaps chipped it, sundered the skin and flesh but done no worse damage. It flexed awkwardly, hot and swollen, but had enough strength to bear a shield. Then he lifted a half-pike. The grim stabbing weapon for close-quarter fighting. Yet it felt too heavy to him, the evilly spiked head alone weighing twelve or fifteen pounds. A weapon for a man with two strong arms.

He knew his advantage was in fleetness of eye and foot, not muscular strength. And he had already lost blood, flesh, strength again over the last days. Instead he found himself a sword, regretting that the sword of the Chevalier Bridier was left over in the house of Franco Briffa. But may he fight with the spirit of Bridier nevertheless.

Here was a long slim sword, finely balanced, the hilt butted with a fat leaden sphere to make the lean furrowed blade feel almost weightless.

Then in the charnel house of the inner yard, surrounded by the dead, he flexed and moved and eased himself into fighting.

From the walls above came cries and shots, yet they seemed thinly scattered.

He whipped the blade through the air before him a couple more times. Took one deep breath, kissed the blade, said a prayer. And then went up the steps, now rust-brown with old blood, to join his brothers.

He came up into the midst of a new attack, with barely time to register the situation of the fort or condition of the men. He saw through the black smoke-laden air that all four of Elmo’s star points were now reduced to promontories of rubble. The single high bastion was half blasted away, and almost the entire parapet along the northern and western sides had been reduced, to be hurriedly bulked by sacks of earth, stone blocks and wicker gabions. Most calamitous of all, the main northern wall teetered dangerously out over the ditch, ready to collapse, filling the gulf with its own bulk, and leaving the fort exposed along far too long a front for the defenders to save. Yet still it held.

As for the men still fighting, there remained perhaps fifty or sixty. So few.

There was Lanfreducci, his face pale with siege fever and blood loss, yet he cried out and grinned when he saw Nicholas through the black fog, and called him a damned young fool.

There was Stanley, and Medrano, and De Guaras, and Luigi Broglia still in command, and fighting as an unbreakable pair those two Spanish soldiers, García and Zacosta, and Captain Miranda too. Every one of them loading and firing his arquebus with fanatic swiftness, screaming through his teeth, hair plastered across his cheeks. Broglia heaving the organ gun around on the crippled bastion roof, single-handed because his four-man gun crew all lay dead or dying around him, bringing it to bear once more on the section under attack, loading each of the eight barrels himself with dogged determination. His eyes shone from a face powdered and sooted like an Ethiop’s.

Random fires blazed and billowed, the walls were smoke-darkened, and above them on the last few feet of high bastion, the flag of St John, ripped and frayed, still flew.

The smoke and dust were blinding but the heat was worse, and the noise worse still. For a few minutes the infantry attack was held once more, and another lacerating volley of cannon fire came in. Defenders sank down behind the improvised ramps and bulking, gulped foul water, loosened helmet straps and dropped their heads as the iron and stone and marble balls hurtled in yet again. Such a volley that at its height, Nicholas could not distinguish one blast from another, only a continual roaring wave that did not cease.

His eardrums fluttered in his skull, he bent his head and cradled it in his right arm, and a hand was laid on his shoulder. Lanfreducci.

‘Brace up,’ he shouted through the storm. ‘Soon you’ll be as deaf as the rest of us!’

The Italian knight had a bloody rag stuck in one ear.

Worse than the rolling thunder of the guns was the dread pause between. He lay side on, favouring his good elbow, and glanced through a crack between two sacks. Not three hundred yards away, with sweat dripping down from his bloody head bandages, already saturated, he saw with blurred eyes a hot bronze barrel being rapidly cleaned and reloaded. Then the agonised moment of silence, the muzzle seeming to gape directly at him. The black muzzle like a lightless evil eye. The gunner lowered the smoking rope to the hole and in the instant of sizzling burn, on an impulse, he rolled a few yards to the left, until he bumped up against García.

The next moment a thirty-pound ball erupted through the sacks where he had just lain. They were blasted high into the air, ruptured into tatters, the contents falling back over where he and García huddled. But it was only earth, it could have been worse. He opened his eyes. The ball had gone on and destroyed yet more of the bastion, then rolled down into the inner yard, bounced over the hardpacked earth there and ended pummelling into a mound of heaped corpses.

Another ball hit two men crouching along the barricade not twenty yards down and they flew high into the air, limbs flailing, both dead already. One fell in the yard below, one landed stretched limp and near naked over a torn, toothed section of wall, his body obscenely elongated, innards spilling.

More balls came in, many marble. The deafening bang, the whine, eardrums batting and pulsing and nerves shredded. Splinters of hot stone shrapnel shearing through the tremulous heat haze of summer air, billowing clouds of soot-black dust, and then a volley of defiant musket fire from the defenders kneeling up once more, trying to take out any gunners careless enough to show themselves above their own breastworks. And everywhere gunpowder smoke bitter on the parched dry tongue, and so dense that the enemy might advance through it at a slow march and not be seen.

The enemy were advancing again.

The last defenders of Elmo dragged themselves back to the cordons of rubble, spat out gobs of cartridge paper, teeth blackened with cordite, reloaded, wondering how much powder and ball remained to them. They gulped down scoops of wine and water, wiped trickles of sweat-diluted blood from their eyes, spat blood and teeth, cried out to each other last words of encouragement and defiance. Lanfreducci even yelled out, seeing another movement among the Turks as they reformed beyond the bridge, ‘Aha, we’ve got ’em on the run now, boys!’

His forehead streamed with fresh blood from a shrapnel splinter, and he was dragging one leg behind him, but he seemed oblivious.

He would die laughing in the teeth of the enemy. They would kill him but they would not break him.

Nicholas gripped his sword hilt. Now let it come. He hoped to die like this if he must die, on the barricades, sword in hand. Let it be quick, but let him take some with him.

The Turks came swirling through the smoke of their own cannons, over now-toughened, scaffolded and reinforced bridges made of hardened Turkish pine from galley masts, lashed thickly together with ships’ rope. The last few battered defenders had no hope of firing and collapsing them as before. There were too many and they were too few.

Nevertheless a last gallant knight went down on a rope to try. He was shot by a Turkish marksman and left hanging there. They could not retrieve him.

Another fellow next to Nicholas was hit, an unlucky shot that ricocheted off his steel gorget and ploughed up into his throat. He gagged and fell backwards. Another shot whined off the stones nearby. Nicholas seized the man’s arm and hauled him back into the cover of the cordon.

‘Cursed luck,’ gurgled the soldier. ‘The ball’s just under the skin.’ His throat was filling with blood, but he seemed not seriously hurt. He pulled off his helmet and then one glove and groped about with his bare fingers. ‘I could almost pull it free myself.’

And then a heinous brass firebomb came arcing in over the cordon and exploded right above them. In the random way of such cruel weapons, not a splinter touched Nicholas, but four or five broad shards of ragged, superheated brass drove into the back of the fellow’s exposed head. He simply sat forward, the bloody mess of his head in Nicholas’s lap. The boy screamed despite himself. Then Stanley was beside him and taking the dead man by the shoulders and laying him back on the ground. Bullets and arrows and cannonballs seemed to fill the air around them as if they were in a storm, yet Nicholas was aware of nothing but the dead man, the back of his head blown away, the light in his eyes gone out.

Stanley shook him. ‘Get below, boy. Have some water and wine.’

Nicholas shook his head dumbly.

‘Get below!’ shouted Stanley, as belligerent as any master-sergeant. ‘And keep down!’

Nicholas crawled for the low bastion door.

He glugged down a scoop of water and wine, shook his head and breathed deep. He had no cloth he could use, and it was wrong to waste water. So he took a handful of dust from the ground of the inner court, and cast it over the front of his breeches. The dry dust quickly soaked up the black and purple mess of blood and brain adhering there, and he brushed it off with his sleeve. Then he crossed himself and prayed for the passage of the nameless soldier’s soul, and took another scoop of wine and water, and finally stopped shaking. He set back his shoulders and thought of his father, and then went to climb the stone steps back to the firestorm above.

A fine Janizary in tall white hat and scarlet waistcoat, wielding a mace, its wings deep-toothed, came dashing up the rubble of the shattered point, urging on those behind, slipping over the blood-slathered bodies of their fallen comrades. Stanley stood swiftly and shot his arquebus from the hip but it misfired and the imposing Janizary came on. He rested his left hand on the rubble barrier and leapt over in a clean vault, pirouettting and expertly swinging his mace, which struck Stanley, slow with exhaustion, a ferocious blow which met the knight’s ungauntleted right hand.

He reeled in agony and stepped back, the Janizary raising his mace for another swift and decisive blow. Nicholas raced up and thrust from behind and his blade glanced off. Beneath the Turk’s scarlet waistcoat was evidently a very fine steel breastplate. The Janizary turned, his eyes dark-browed and flashing with strange pleasure. He stepped back and forth. Nicholas hesitated. Here was one of the finest soldiers in the world, veteran of a hundred battles on three different continents. Guns roared about his ears, desperate cries that sounded like the last cries of men. Perhaps this was the end.

Stanley had collapsed back against a wall, clutching his hand to his chest, his face a rictus of pain.

Nicholas weaved left and right and then wide aside and raised the sword before his eyes as if sighting down a musket barrel. He saw the mace rise high in the air, but by that time he had already thrust forward and the blade was through and a foot of it out of the back of the Janizary’s throat. He pulled it cleanly out again and the man fell, blood pumping rhythmically from the front of his throat, and Nicholas finished him with another sharp stab straight through his broad forehead.

Onward surged the mix of Janizaries and less disciplined auxiliaries, Moors and Algerians. A dark fellow straight out of Ethiopia or the Nubian desert, barefoot and wearing bells on his anklets, a white wrap around his forehead and a loincloth, naked otherwise, came at him babbling and whooping. Nicholas wrong-footed him, leaping high onto the barrier and stuck the lean point of his sword straight through his heart. He pulled it free and leapt back again like a cat, the fellow falling dead against him, almost knocking him down.

‘Bravo!’ cried Lanfreducci.

He steadied himself. Never stop moving, never stop to admire your handiwork, fight on. Hit first, hit hard, and carry on hitting. Remember Smith’s lessons. Never look back. And get over there to Stanley.

Another younger Janizary, in a green tunic and white hat, carrying a long musket, died at a long broadsword backslash from Lanfreducci, and another Nubian, finely arrayed in leopard-skin topped with a leopard-skin hat stuck with orange feathers, was torn open by a close-range blast from a squat-barrelled arquebus packed with the devil knew what, for it was no clean ball that made that carnage. He flopped limp over the barrier and Nicholas pushed him clear, his tattered lungs dragging out on the sandbags. The attack began to falter, the shouting died down, the survivors retreated back across the bridge. There were more distant shouts of the Ottoman captains, lambasting their fleeing men.

Nicholas ran to Stanley, who was trying to bandage up his shattered right hand with his teeth. He was finished fighting.

‘You fight like a devil still,’ he said. ‘Bandage my fingers. Tie them tight.’

‘Your hand’s ruined,’ said Nicholas.

‘Do as I say,’ he rasped. ‘Tie forefinger and middle tight together, and the other two likewise. I will hold a sword that way.’

So he tied his right hand into a bandaged white claw, and helped him to his feet. Stanley’s left arm hung down loose now, useless, the sling torn away, and Nicholas could see with dismay how badly it was wounded, dark oily blood oozing down over his forearm. But Stanley said no more, took up his sword in the bandaged linen claw of his right hand, and went back to stand beside Medrano, looking out over the piled dead, the groaning dying below.

‘As they say in the Turkish orta,’ said the tall Spanish knight, ‘the body of a Janizary is but a stepping stone for his comrades behind.’

The last thirty or so Spanish soldiers went their rounds. Some collected musket balls where they could find them. They collected the very grains of powder out of the pockets of their fallen brethren. At least, those that were not sodden with blood.

Word went round that Luigi Broglia lay dead in the inner yard, beheaded by a culverin ball. They bowed their heads and crossed themselves.

One by one they must fall.

A knight slumped near, he seemed to be singing a low song. He held out a flask to the English boy and it was full of black gleaming powder still. He gave him a pouch of twenty or thirty more balls and his arquebus. Nicholas did not ask why he could no longer shoot himself. Instead he asked, taking the gun from him, ‘What day is it? Stanley does not know.’

The knight raised his eyes to the sky and they were maddened. ‘Nor do I know,’ he said, and began to laugh. It was fearful that he should laugh so, his head back, eyelids half lowered. The loss of control was shameful. And worse, Nicholas was afraid he might start laughing with him.

‘I do not know!’ cried the knight. ‘How long have we been here, how long have we been fighting! Perhaps a month? A year? Are we old men? Elmo will never be done. We have been fighting here now for thirty years, and our hair is white — but we do not know it because we have no looking-glass!’

Nicholas tucked the arquebus under his arm and went below to drink more water and snatch a handful of bread and wine, and pray for his soul that would shortly stand in its sinful nakedness before the Throne of Judgement. Yet surveying the last of the defenders, he began to understand that those who had survived thus far — maddened and wounded as they were — had also toughened like old leather under the sun. And he too. Already they understood now how to duck and run, how to use cover, how to listen out for the whistle of incoming cannonball, how to spy on cannons and estimate trajectories, all without conscious effort. Many had died in the first few days. But more recently, the Turks had killed fewer, not more.

He reloaded the arqbuebus swiftly and deftly, and looked around. No one had seen him do it, and he mocked himself inwardly for his vanity at wanting to be seen. In this slaughterhouse. But he knew it was very quick.

There came a distant, juddering bang, and the noise of something blustering through the air, and he stepped smoothly into an open doorway. A cannonball from a long-range gun sheared in low over the remains of the north wall and ploughed deep into the ground of the inner yard, gouging a long groove of earth before it, settling up against a barrack-room wall. In the following silence he darted over and touched the cannonball’s iron surface. Still hot. If only they still had men enough to serve their own guns, it might be re-used, and sent back to its makers with vengeance written on it in blood. But a single gun needed half a dozen men. They didn’t have half a dozen men.

At Angelo, La Valette asked about the rumour that Dragut had been injured on Is-Salvatur. Some were even saying he was killed.

‘It is not credible,’ said the Grand Master.

‘It would be by the grace of God,’ said Sir Oliver Starkey.

La Valette said slowly, as if picturing it, ‘The boy swimming past them … he made them work too fast. They misfired, hit their own breastwork, or a barrel cracked …’

Starkey nodded. ‘Dragut has not been seen out on Sciberras for a day or more. No sighting.’

La Valette clasped his hands, as if in prayer that it might be so. It would be their first good fortune in months. Though it was too late now for the news to be carried to Elmo.

The knights tore up the shirts of the dead to wrap around their heads, or to staunch their wounds, the white turning red to match their surcoats. Bearded and exhausted, snatching mouthfuls of bread, minutes of sleep when they could.

‘If a man can stand,’ said Medrano, ‘he is not wounded.’

The Spanish knight, their new commander now, addressed them all in the precious lull, his face lean and intelligent, his eyes hooded and fierce.

There were no more elaborate fire hoops or exploding brass grenades left, and too little powder for cannon, even if they had the crews to serve them. They would fight on with notched and broken blades and muskets, and when the powder ran out, they would use their muskets as clubs. They would fight with stones. They would fight with their bare hands.

‘How bitter it will be for the Turks when they understand that every inch of wall, every stone, must be fought for, bled for. Nothing will be given to them. Nothing!’

The last knights began to nod and raise their weary arms and cheered.

Not an inch of Elmo would be given away, said Medrano. Not one shot-splintered stone. They would fight unto the very last. And the story of how they fought at Elmo would be told forever after, till world end.