The Great Siege

13

A bird cried out to sea.

Scribbles of cloud in the fading sky like Arab script.

A lucky Turkish shot took down the banner of St John itself, smashing through the flagstaff. Lanfreducci somehow managed to scramble back up there, insanely exposed, one of his legs a mere burden to him, and raised it up again on a pike, half as high again as it had been before. Shots whistled round him. He grinned and taunted them.

Nicholas could not move, his eyes black and hollow, staring at nothing. Blood and spittle drooling from his lips, leaning on his gun, looking at the ground at his feet but seeing nothing, the ground itself swaying and tilting under him. Then he knelt and fell sideways without a sound. Looking out on nothing but emptiness with the hollows of his eyes. The face of war. Beyond exhaustion, mind reeling, then floating away in white smoke, body incapable of stirring another inch.

Then the call went up, Medrano’s even voice. The Turks were already re-forming.

Around him where he lay, men who looked beyond the last stages of war-wounded, far beyond mere field casualties, were stirring and dragging themselves to their feet where they had fallen.

Wounded man knelt beside wounded man and held a flask of water to parched lips. The wounded drank, hands shaking, neck straining, lips split and bleeding with the sun. Then wounded man helped wounded man to his knees, his feet, leaning on shattered pikestaffs and gunstocks for crutches, thighs bandaged, arms in slings. One man loaded up an arquebus and handed it to another, who took it unsteadily in his left hand. His right arm dangled down useless at his side, hand severed above the wrist.

Stanley was beside him and holding out his great crushed bandaged hand, saying with his sad smile, ‘Come then, little brother. Come with us to our deaths.’

He heaved himself to his feet on his arquebus, butt in the dust, one hand gripping Stanley’s rock-like arm. He took a breath and stood swaying a moment until enough blood coursed again through his veins.

He followed after Stanley to the steps.

De Guaras was lying in the dust of the inner yard, trying to push himself up where he lay on his belly, only to collapse again.

‘Brother,’ said Stanley gently, halting beside him and seeing the extent of his wounds. ‘Lie still.’

‘I cannot,’ he gasped, almost sobbing. Bravest of the brave, weeping in the dust. ‘God forgive me but I cannot. My strength is all gone, my sword arm …’

‘Here,’ said Nicholas, and he pulled up a lump of shattered stone and put it at De Guaras’s head, and drew a cloth over it and the knight’s face so that he should have shade a few minutes, as he died there.

‘No,’ said De Guaras, pushing the cloth away again. ‘Let me burn. Let me not be covered, not even from God’s midday sun. Let me die hearing my valiant brothers fighting to the last.’

Then he held Nicholas’s hand and Stanley’s and there was no more to be said, not another word.

Nicholas lifted his arquebus onto his shoulder and followed Stanley over to the foot of the steps. He looked up. Eighteen steps to the parapet. He thought of the climb up the Stiperstones and Long Mynd, and the rapturous views west over the mountains of Wales. But that climb of his boyhood, made so many countless happy times, was as nothing to these eighteen steps. These would exhaust him beyond any hill in England. Yet he climbed slowly up, legs burning, head thumping, to crouch behind the low barricade at the top.

In the door of the bastion behind appeared another figure. It was Captain Miranda, head bandaged, arm and leg bloody. But the worst wound was in his side, hidden and cinched in beneath a tightly laced jerkin.

He growled, ‘All that’s holding my guts in is my belt.’

Men leaned on their elbows, sighted with tired eyes, past all anxiety in a world falling almost silent around them with tiredness.

The Turks were coming again.

They could not go on.

They would go on.

The Janizaries came running with eager tread, a new regiment, like men just sprung from bed, in their first youth, at dawn. They came brimming with murderous energy, some grinning beneath their black moustaches. Surely they would be the ones who finally stormed this wretched fort, and won the glory!

The knights waited, the distance closed.

Here came death, beautiful under the sun, in ranks of fanatic hordes from a foreign land. The knights swooned and dreamed. Here came death in white silk robes, scimitars sailing overhead, crying of Allah and Paradise. And the knights too, bowed down beneath the burden of their wounds and their exhaustion, longed for the Paradise of their faith. They dreamed of green grassy ways and the shade of fruit-laden trees, the golden city of Zion amid the gardens, and their wounds cleansed and healed, their love unto death requited.

The air was splintered with cries and howls. Shots rang out. The bridges were crammed, fresh scaling ladders knocked against unmanned walls to the south. The cannonade of Smith’s horse pistol rang out, in the hands of Miranda now, and a besieger flew back off a ladder, hitting the rocks hard below.

Medrano alone saw that another, smaller group of Turks, carrying heavy backpacks, were moving out wide and at a run, towards the rear cavalier and the gate. There was not one defender left there to shoot them down.

Nicholas raced over to the south wall and raised his sword, his every fibre burning and crying out, and was fighting again.

He stepped aside and brought his sword down hard onto the nearest Turk’s shoulder. A clumsy stroke. The Turk turned it easily with a swipe of his small round shield and stuck his scimitar in Nicholas’s breastplate. But even in his last exhaustion, the boy stepped back with his instinctive grace of movement and the sword point did no more than punch the air from his chest, its power lost.

In the same instant, never hesitating, never stopping, whilst the Turk drew back his sword for another stroke, the boy spun and drove his sword forward under arm, and the Turk was skewered, falling back off the ladder. His fall dragged the boy with him. He twisted and slammed against the broken parapet and only held onto his weapon by a whisker, the hilt so slippery with blood. Another Turk hacked down to slice through his arm but he rolled away and the Turk was in over the parapet and standing before him hollering. They ducked each other’s blows and the Turk slithered and slipped and the boy slipped too in the shambles of the strewn and crumpled bodies. Sitting up, Nicholas aimed at the fellow’s armpit where it was uncovered by breastplate, and stuck his sword awkwardly in. A horrible stroke, a crude stabbing, like that of a backstreet thug.

The Turk howled with pain and his sword fell. He clutched his armpit, blood seeping through the white silk, and Nicholas was back on his feet and had stabbed him long through the throat and out the back of his neck before he could do more. Then he knew that these were no longer the best regiments they were sending in. So much for his white Janizary silk. This man had fought with all the experience of a ploughman or wagoner, conscripted only last week.

What butchery it was. The fellow lay back gargling blood. Nicholas turned and almost toppled off the wall, so clumsy with exhaustion, but still fighting, still killing. Anointed in fresh gore with each new enemy, each new encounter, morion and breastplate and blade agleam with a new red sheen of slaughter every time.

A lull. García gave the English boy a glug of wine from his flask. It was nearly gone. The boy went back to the south wall and waited. He was a boy with a man’s heart.

Zacosta shook his head. ‘How can men fight in this heat?’

García said, ‘They’re not fighting, they’re dreaming. None of them knows any more who he is or where he is.’

‘Or what he’s fighting for.’

‘That least of all.’

Nicholas knew. He fought for one thing and for one thing only. He had forgotten that this was a Holy War, or he only remembered nightly when he came to pray, to ask for God’s blessing, and forgiveness for blood shed. He no longer thought of this as some vast historic struggle between rival Empires, enemy civilisations, Cross and Crescent, true faith against false. Such abstractions meant little in a charnel house like this. They melted away in the red heat of battle. He no longer fought even for his father’s memory and his family’s pride. His father was dead: he had seen him die and spoken with him as he died, and he saw his face and heard his voice still daily. But let the dead bury the dead. It was the way of all the earth. One day he would return, to find his sisters, fight to win back the name and honour of his family.

But for now, he thought of one thing only, as he fought, reloaded, fired, struck, stabbed, buffeted, reeled back. A thing still closer to his heart. He fought not for his father or his sisters or his name, not for St George or England, the Knights or the Cross. He fought for her. Maddalena. He fought ferociously, and for the simplest reason. The harder he fought, the longer Elmo held, the longer it would be before the Turkish guns turned back on her.

They attacked Elmo by night, the exhausted sleeping knights stumbling to their feet to a weary trumpet call. The Janizaries’ white robes gleaming by moonlight, sweat-slicked skins orange by torchlight. The attackers fired flares and firebombs and in a scene from hell, wheeled up a wagon holding a brass barrel with a long spout that looked like some gleaming brass-winged insect, hugely fat-bellied. They lit a touch-hole and the spout shot forth thirty-foot flames in an angry animal roar. Two knights were caught by that burning tongue and turned into living torches, yet even in their death trance they ran out across the bridges and hurled themselves burning into the midst of the enemy, who were aghast at such colossal courage even in the agony of death. The defenders were equally astounded that they still had strength in their arms, blood still swelling their hearts.

In a small but concerted pike charge, masterminded by Medrano, the Turks were driven off again, with great slaughter.

The stench from the ditch below was almost enough to knock a man senseless. The flies buzzed and gorged and laid their eggs day and night, through all gunfire. It was terrible to sleep through such a stench, it infected one’s very dreams. But when the sun came up at dawn and burned down on the rotting bodies, it was worse.

It was the Valley of Gehenna spoken of in the Scriptures, said Fra Giacomo, outside the walls of Jerusalem, where the wicked in ancient times offered up their own sons and daughters in sacrifice to their false gods.

‘See,’ he said. ‘See where Suleiman the Magnificent and the Lords of the Ottomans have offered up their children to their false god likewise, and lain them out upon the altar of death. How the sacrificed sons of Suleiman are to be pitied. How the stench of his vainglory and wickedness rises to Heaven.’

The cannons continued to roar all night, but no more attacks came.

In the leaden light before dawn, they saw with grieving eyes and heavy hearts that a green banner of Islam hung limp but unmistakable on the roof of the ravelin. Turkish snipers, well defended, now looked down on them from less than fifty yards away.

It was a cruel error. Desperately short of men, Medrano had left a single watchman there, and at dusk some knights had checked and seen him lying patiently on lookout. In fact he was already dead with a shot to the heart.

The Turks had followed up under cover of darkness. Mustafa Pasha sent out a small team of his élite night warriors, who wore black robes, and nothing on their feet but black cloth wrappings so that they might move silently over any terrain. They blackened their faces, and carried no weapons but black-metalled knives. And in the night they had successfully climbed the outer walls of the little ravelin, ready to cup the mouths and slit the throats of any weary watchmen leaning on their pikes there. But there had been no need. As the Janizary musketeer had boasted, he had taken out the single watchman there with a single shot.

The Ottomans were now in possession of an outlying corner of the fort itself.

The knights could also see their slain comrade, the watchman, one of the tough veteran Spanish soldiers. One of the last. As a powerful signal that this was indeed guerre à l’outrance, Mustafa had ordered him tied by the ankles and then suspended head down, sliced throat exposed, and hung out over the wall of the ravelin so that the last of the stubborn defenders could see what fate awaited them.

Yet the sight of the atrocity made none quaver with the fear that Mustafa intended. Some wept, some sickened, some grimaced. But all felt the steel of righteous vengeance in their bellies.

From Angelo, La Valette could discern the green banner through an eyeglass.

‘Take it back, my Brothers,’ he urged under his breath. ‘Fight.’

‘Sire,’ said Oliver Starkey at his side, quiet and steady. ‘They have fought as few men have ever fought before.’

La Valette lowered the eyeglass. ‘I know,’ he said. ‘I know it.’

He ordered a last desperate attempt to help them.

He spoke to a master gunner on the east wall of the castle and asked him if he could fire a shot high over the Grand Harbour and hit the Turkish lines.

The master gunner shook his head. ‘As I said to you before, Sire, at this range we might hit anything.’

‘Try it, man. Do your best. God will guide.’

The master gunner was as experienced as any, and yet the first shot he fired curved right as it flew over the harbour and struck an unmanned section of Elmo’s wall itself. A few yards’ difference and it could easily have killed the defenders.

A look of agony crossed La Valette’s aged face. Then he turned away.

‘We cannot help them,’ he said. ‘They are truly on their own.’

In the brief silences between the roaring of the guns, there came another sound. Far quieter, but to the ears of siege veterans, far more ominous. The steady, rhythmic chink chink of pick axe on solid rock. The Turkish miners were at work down in the great ditch below, now working quite free of enemy fire, since they had possession of the flanking ravelin. The defenders could no longer fire down on them, only hear them at their relentless task. Soon the walls would be down.

Yet they could only imagine what it must be like to work down there in that reeking netherworld, amid the heaps of dead bodies and the clouds of flies. The flesh of the dead around them turning green and then black with putrefaction, sliding off bones like soft cheese.

‘They’ll blow them in a day or two,’ said Zacosta. He grimaced at Nicholas. ‘Do not be taken alive by these unbelieving dogs, lad. Find some way. For they have a taste for boys, for fairhead boys like you. Or they will torture you for information, with the very worst tortures they can devise. They will torture you simply for amusement. In celebration of Elmo’s fall.’

‘Hold your tongue, man,’ growled Stanley nearby.

‘You know I speak the truth,’ said Zacosta.

Nicholas glanced at Stanley, his ravaged and sunburnt face, lips and cheeks blistering through the black mask of powder soot. He said no more.

At dawn the snipers on the ravelin began to fire down on them in earnest, at the slightest movement behind the cordons. They bulked up the defences as best they could, but the ravelin’s height placed then at a grim disadvantage.

Sheltering behind a low barricade, the ridge splintering in a ceaseless hail of bullets, Medrano shouted to Stanley, ‘The Venetians at Padua, half a century ago — 1509, the Italian Wars. Under severe siege. They mined their own walls!’

Stanley frowned.

‘When the French took them, the Venetians lit the fuse.’

‘Padua fell?’

‘For sure Padua fell. But a lot of Frenchmen died taking it.’

Stanley shouted, ‘It would be good if we’d thought to mine the ravelin so.’

Medrano’s lean face split in a rare grin.

‘We did?’

‘It’s beyond the next star point, right below the ravelin.’

Lanfreducci insisted on going.

‘You can hardly walk, Brother.’

The Italian just grinned his broad, handsome grin. ‘But I can crawl excellent well. And this is a job for a crawler.’

‘It’s a very long powder trail,’ said Medrano. ‘It may not go, and if it does, it’ll take minutes. Meanwhile the snipers will be after you all the way as you crawl out below the parapet.’

‘It’s in God’s hands,’ said Lanfreducci.

A sniper observed the wounded knight clawing his way behind a near-flattened section of parapet almost immediately, and took aim. That sixth sense of the veteran soldier told Lanfreducci that a musket muzzle was aimed straight at him, and he curled himself into a ball behind a single earth-filled barrel. His face creased in agony as he bent his wounded leg, and he could feel fresh blood seeping from the split crust. But he hauled it in close by the ankle, numb below the knee, all pain above it, and lay there curled up as best he could.

A sniper musket wavered over the ravelin wall. He held his fire.

A few moments later a helmeted head appeared round the side of the barrel and a single sniper bullet put a hole clean through it.

The helmet rolled away. It was a feint, a helmet of one fallen, held out by the trapped knight.

As the sniper angrily set himself to reload, and called up his fellows to take the shot, the Italian set off crawling like a lizard along the wall, weight on his forearms, working forward rapidly, one leg dragging behind him.

Now he would not stop. A musket cracked out, yet it missed him. He crawled on. The Turks knew now that something was up. He must be stopped. Another musket shot, and a small plume of blood rose from his shoulder, but he crawled on without slackening his pace one iota. Then a dreadful sound: the spattering bark of a cannon loaded with grapeshot.

Grapeshot from the roof of the ravelin, fired down on a single wounded man.

Medrano lost his cool composure then and cried out in anger. He fired an angry shot up at the ravelin, but it was wasted.

The smoke drifted across the ditch from the fired gun, and Lanfreducci’s prostrate form was momentarily lost to view. In the moment before, Stanley thought he had glimpsed the terrible sight of the knight arching up from the ground, head thrown back, as the balls spat into him. But then the smoke finally cleared — and he was nowhere to be seen.

His brother knights clenched their fists.

On the ravelin, another sniper took careful aim. The Turks could see what they could not. He was in no hurry. Then the muzzle flared and a shot rang out, and distraught, they heard the sniper crew erupt in a great cheer and saw them exchange a flurry of shoulder slaps.

Medrano and Stanley both crossed themselves. Fra Francesco Lanfreducci had left Elmo far behind. It was but consummation.

Nothing more came. The ravelin remained. The snipers looked down on them and reloaded their fine bore muskets.

Then they all suddenly looked back aghast.

The defenders peered out.

Round the corner of the shattered point came a figure dragging his leg. His breastplate and backplate so pocked and ruptured with lead that he looked squilled like a porcupine. He was grinning.

‘My God is a burning fire!’ he cried out.

He was hit again where he stood, and calmly sat down against the back wall, in full view of the ravelin. He removed his helmet and set it by his side, and leaned his head back like a man tired with a hot morning’s walk. Eyes crinkled in the sun, white teeth showing in a smile.

The Turks took aim again.

He called out to them with tattered lungs, ‘More haste, more haste, you uncomely sons of Oriental whores! I tire here. You must be using mouse turds for balls!’

Then there came a full blast of half a dozen muskets at no more than twenty yards’ range, and the Hospitaller slid sideways to the ground, a smear of blood on the wall at his back, eyes closed in peace.

The Turks did not celebrate this time. It had been a man among men they had killed, whatever insults he had hurled at them in dying, and he had a contempt for death as fine as any Janizary could muster. Let him lie there and sleep undisturbed.

The world was ruptured by an explosion so vast that it was some time before any there, defender or attacker, could shake his thoughts into sense. With animal instinct, Nicholas simply cowered behind the cordon, his face pressed so hard against the wickerwork of a gabion that it left an imprint on his cheek, his arms over his head, lumps of rock and stone showering down around him. None struck him, mercifully. One alone might have broken his arm.

A long time passed. The darkened sky gradually cleared, the ringing in their ears slowly subsided. There was stunned silence from all sides.

They squinted out. Clouds of dust and smoke hung like ragged veils over the ravelin. Or where the ravelin had been. As the veils slowly cleared they saw nothing but a field of rubble. They could not even discern any human remains.

Medrano said, ‘When we laid the charge, as you see, we still had plenty of powder. In those far-off days.’

The water itself was now foul to the taste, but men’s tongues and lips were black with thirst. There were no more frontal attacks that day. Medrano thought he knew why, but he said nothing to the men.

Stanley understood too. He said quietly, ‘They are confident of breaking in soon another way.’

Medrano’s lean, sallow face looked at its most grave and composed. ‘I think they will soon blow the main gates at the cavalier. A mining gang was round there. Then they will be in. There is no more we can do.’

‘But look what we have done,’ said Stanley. ‘How many days did we win for Birgu?’

‘Many,’ said Medrano, and his sweat-streaked, dirt-streaked face showed a distant smile. ‘We lost count how many. But many days we bought for our brothers over the water. Our Grand Master will have made sure Birgu is now defended as best as it can be.’

‘And we died honourably, did we not?’ said Stanley, his voice soft and low.

Medrano liked the past tense. ‘We died honourably,’ he said. ‘As at Acre, as at Jerusalem. As Knights Hospitaller should die.’