The Great Siege

14

Before a huge column of Janizaries, fresh and armed and bathed and scented with rosewater for the fall, Mustapha Pasha strode and screamed derision. They shifted with painful discomfort, looked down at their feet and bore it in silence as they must.

‘So-called Sons of the Sultan!’ he raged. ‘You have fought these last days and weeks like women! The dogs and pigs of Christendom, they laugh at you, they call you little girls, daughters of Eve, of Lilith! They think you are men with breasts, fit only for sewing and baking!’

The Janizaries glowered and clutched their sword hilts tighter.

‘Now go out and destroy them, your most ancient enemies! They who have killed so many of your beloved brothers. Instruct them in the way of the Janizary, teach them that there can never be forgiveness and mercy between Islam and the Cross, and show them that you are men, not women, and understand how to kill.’

Dusk fell on Elmo, and with it an ominous, oppressive sense of expectation. Now they were only waiting for the end.

Stanley spoke to the boy. ‘You are not mortally injured.’

‘I’m bad enough.’ He hurt all over. Even tiredness could not dull it.

‘The Turks will be in very soon now. I think tonight. You must escape. Go over the south-east wall and down to the rocks. I know you can swim.’

‘I go if you go.’

‘I can’t swim. And I will not abandon my brothers. I am a knight, you are-’

‘Just a vagabond orphan and exile.’

‘No.’ Stanley smiled gently. ‘You are a deal more than that.’

‘So you’ll not try to come?’

He shook his head. ‘It is not the way for me.’

‘Smith still lives, but mortally wounded.’

Stanley looked enquiring.

‘If he set eyes on you again, lying there in the Sacred Infirmary — you know he would rally. That would be better medicine for him than all the skill and art of Fra Reynaud. You know how he would come to himself then, fight off his sickness and fevers with all his strength. And then you could both join in the fight for Birgu. You know you will be needed there.’

‘You argue with all the guile of a Vatican cardinal, boy.’

‘Besides, La Valette will want to hear of the Battle of Elmo from survivors.’

‘You will survive. But not I. As I say, here is the way to death for me. Here at Elmo.’

The boy looked so haunted and sad in the gathering darkness, fitfully lit by guttering fires. Stanley knew that he and Smith between them were something like fathers to him now. And he would only lose them again. Yet a knight’s duty was not to his fellow men, but with all stern unbending piety towards God alone.

‘When the Turks come in, you will go,’ he said. ‘I will give you the shove myself. Return to Smith, and to Birgu. The family, and — the girl.’

Nicholas looked at him sharply, but Stanley was beyond teasing now.

Nicholas said, ‘If you look out from the south-east wall — what’s left of it — on the rocks below you will see a broad flat timber washed up. From the boat of the two fishermen, destroyed by the guns of Is-Salvatur.’

‘Yes?’

‘Immediately below on the rocks,’ persisted the boy. ‘You say you cannot swim. Wood floats. Do you follow me?’

‘I follow your meaning,’ said Stanley. ‘Surely you should be a wily diplomat for the Vatican when you are grown. But-’

It was not a big explosion, but measured just sufficient by the expert Mameluke engineers to blow open an entrance below the cavalier, and then swiftly another charge was placed at the foot of the stout wooden gates into the fort. One or two knights hauled themselves to their feet where they lay in the inner yard, and tried to make it up the steps to fire down on the miners. But it was hopeless. The Turks proceeded with ruthless speed and efficiency, knowing that the defenders were now too reduced and exhausted to pose a threat to them as they worked, and the snipers and gunners out on the ravelin gave them added cover. There came a muffled crump from beyond the gates and the gates shuddered. Another few moments and they would be in.

From the north wall a cry went up. An immense column of Janizaries was moving fast and wide round the back of Elmo, a captain at their head bellowing out to the engineers to get that gate down now, they were coming in. The miners worked frenziedly, packing up another pile of powder below the hinges of the right gate.

With the Janizaries came a rabblement of Bektaşis, daggers clutched in their fists, howling the ten thousand names of God, eyes bloodshot and deranged. Some split off and came rushing the bridges to distract the last of the defenders from the main gate.

‘Kill! Kill! Kill in the name of Allah!’

At last their time had come.

‘What is my strength, that I should hope?’ murmured Stanley. ‘And what is mine end, that I should prolong my life?’

It was the final moments of Elmo.

‘The last stand!’ bellowed Captain Miranda with bitter humour, crawling out into the yard dragging a stool with him. He could no longer stand. He dragged the stool up in front of the wooden gates and hauled himself into it, and then there he sat — Nicholas would never forget the sight of it — amid the blackened ruins of the fort, eerily lit by the dancing orange flames that still burned. Miranda drew his great two-handed sword from his scabbard and held it out in front of him. Since he could no longer stand, both his legs wounded and half eaten away with black infection, he would fight his last battle sitting down.

His men, García and Zacosta, stood beside their captain to the last. The night sky serene above them. All around the inner yard, and on the walls above, men lying dead under wooden beams, men slumped over barrels stuck with feathered arrows, men standing impaled by spears, men burned beyond recognising, half buried in rubble and shattered stone.

Fewer than thirty remained to fight, some gathering close round the seated Miranda, and others pulling back to the steps of the little chapel with Medrano, their backs to the wall, there to finish their lives and the human pilgrimage.

Fra Giacomo, the only chaplain who still lived, burned the few sparse tapestries, icons and furnishings within the chapel, so that the heathen should not desecrate them. Then he kneeled before the altar, his back to the doorway through which they would come, and bowed his head in prayer.

Another muffled explosion, and very slowly, as if in a dream, amid soft billows of pale dust, the gates fell in and hit the ground, and the Janizaries swarmed over them.

Miranda was shot dead in his chair, still swinging his sword. García was hurled to the ground but picked himself up and managed to seize a pike, before he was beheaded with a scimitar. The others were cut down on the steps of the chapel, and Fra Giacomo slain where he knelt, his lips moving in prayer to the last. One by one they perished.

Medrano died lighting a beacon fire to tell Birgu that Elmo was lost. But as he lay dying on the bastion top, he saw the fire blaze up, and saw the Janizaries let it burn. Let them know across the water that Elmo was lost. Let them know that now it was Birgu’s turn.

The flag of St John, what remnants remained of it, was hauled down and the crescent moon of Islam raised in its stead, to a mighty cheer of Allahu Akhbar!

A Bektaşi dervish hurled himself down onto Stanley from the walls above, a twenty foot drop, and both tumbled into the dust. They rolled together until the knight caved his windpipe in with a blow of his forearm, and leapt to his feet again, unhelmed. Then several shots were fired and either a ball itself or a chip of stone struck the side of his head and he careened running into Nicholas against the wall. He slumped back, eyes closed.

Holding his sword in his right hand, Nicholas hooked the knight’s right arm over his shoulders and put his left arm around the knight’s waist and seized hold of his broad leather sword belt for better grip, dragging him back into the shadows of the colonnade below the south wall. Stanley’s head was rolling alarmingly, he was badly concussed and muttering. Blood streamed from his head wound over Nicholas’s shoulder.

Nicholas dragged him to the foot of the steps under the colonnade, expecting at every moment to feel long cold steel thrust into his backbone, and he prayed with desperation, sweat pouring down his face, prickling his armpits, trying to ignore the dull throbbing ache of his deep-bruised left elbow. The knight might have weighed twice as much as him in full armour, yet he dragged him along, gasping, muscles tearing.

‘Move your legs,’ he hissed.

Stanley mumbled, ‘This is the beginnings of sorrows …’

Nicholas kicked him violently in the side of his calf and Stanley began to take some of his own weight on listless legs.

The boy glanced back out into the moonlit yard and saw Zacosta struck down and on his knees, gouting blood, yet still sweeping his sword wide and low before him, cutting clean through a Turk’s leg just above the foot. He toppled forward and five more swords were raised over him.

He looked away. They came to the foot of the steps and somehow, God alone willing, he half walked, half dragged the bewildered Stanley up them. They emerged onto the height of the ravaged south wall and without a moment’s hesitation, knowing that this was probably when they would be killed, Nicholas broke into a low shuffling run, dragging along the man beside him, thigh muscles screaming, to hurl themselves over the wall. Yet the Janizaries were there already.

Fighting against every base natural instinct to turn Stanley as a shield, he thrust his right side forward and stabbed at a Janizary, who laughed and said something in mocking Turkish about how he was too burdened to fight a good fight. But if Nicholas let Stanley drop, he would never get him up again. The Janizary switched left and right, eyes gleaming, the sea brilliantly moonlit behind his dancing silhouette, and then Nicholas lunged so fast and unexpectedly that he drove the sword point low under the Turk’s waist-sash and he gulped and bent double. He pulled his reeking blade free and left him there, and hauled Stanley onward, the knight muttering that he was blinded by the moon.

Something thumped them from behind, Stanley taking the blow. It was a musket butt, the concussed knight felt little. Nicholas, already bent at the knees, swivelled round as hard as he could, sword out wide, and sliced into the fellow’s hamstrings. There was no time to finish him, but he hoped that would stay him enough. They staggered to the brink of the parapet flattened by cannon fire, he dropped his sword to the ground, more dangerous to take than to leave, and dragged them both over the edge.

Like a drunk man, Stanley hit the steeply sloping rocky ground twenty feet below and rolled on down without apparent injury, coming to rest entangled in the last clumps of brushwood before they gave out to bare sea-washed rock. Nicholas screamed out in agony, he couldn’t help himself, landing with hands outstretched, palms scraped raw, one knee feeling as if it had fully shattered, hipbone bashed, feet curled up and red with pain. But of course the Turks had the fort surrounded by men, and some were already running over to where they lay to finish them.

Stanley flopped over onto his back, his wounded arm useless, gazing up at the dark Mediterranean summer night with his blue English eyes, murmuring softly to himself words Nicholas could no longer understand. The air was filled with the sweet aromatic smell of crushed thyme, the first sweet smell they had known in weeks, and Stanley smiled.

Only the boy could save him, the knight was finished.

He came to his feet, snatching the dagger from its sheath on Stanley’s belt, and closed tight into the nearest Janizary, to the soldier’s surprise. Well inside the sweep of his sword, almost embracing him, Nicholas butted him in the face with the top of his head and then stuck the dagger into his side rapidly, four or five times. He pushed his lifeless body away, gasped at the fresh hot stab of pain in his knee, eyed the two other Janizaries circling him warily. One glanced across at Stanley lying murmurous amid the thyme, carolling, smiling at the stars, and went over quickly to despatch him with a sliced throat while his fellow Janizary dealt with the boy. Nicholas cried out and moved faster than even he knew he could move. He slashed the nearer man across the face and hurtled through the bloody spray to fall on the fellow kneeling beside Stanley like a ministering angel of death. He clamped his left hand over his mouth, wrenched his head back and pulled the dagger hard across his muscular throat, slitting the windpipe. The air whistling free from his lungs, still redolent of tobacco smoke.

He turned back and the fellow with the slashed face was swinging wildly, half blinded, but he was big and strong and had been cut many times before, and now he was angry. He swore and shouted, and more troops were coming round the starpoint to the west, along with a couple of stark naked Bektaşis, who seemed to be carrying severed heads as well as narrow spears.

He could not fight them all. It was a wonder he could fight any. There was one last trick. He dropped to his one good knee and bowed his head in weary surrender, and the Janizary stepped up to behead him, and seeing his red leather boots in the dust feet before him, judging his stance and position, in a flash Nicholas drove the dagger sharply upwards into the man’s groin. He felt the white silk wet with blood and urine, clinging hotly to his hand as he snatched it away. The Janizary screamed in agony and something like terror, unmanned.

The boy did not wait to finish him, but hauled Stanley along by his belt. Twenty yards away came on a dozen men at the run to kill him, fresh and eager. And yes, those were severed heads that the Bektaşis clutched, their bloody fingers plaited in dark matted hair, babbling and singing of Allah and his works.

He raised Stanley under the armpits now and hauled him, heels in the dust. They went down half crawling, half falling over the heaped sandstone boulders below, a bloody dagger clamped between Nicholas’s front teeth, the Janizary’s hot metallic blood running from the blade over his own lips like those of some Carib cannibal. They flopped into the lapping shallows and Nicholas heaved the knight out on his back into a larger deep-water inlet, the pursuers gathering immediately above them. None had musket balls left in their pouches, they had wasted them all in joyous firing into the air at the fall of Elmo, or he and Stanley would have been dead by now. They jabbered on the rock and began to clamber down, blades glinting.

There was the flat timber from the smashed fishing boat where he had observed it and planned it days before.

A skin-and-bone Bektaşi scrambled down to him, eyes rolling, naked but for a sheen of Christian blood in which he seemed to be slathered from crown to toe, as if he had anointed himself in bloody baptism. Nicholas pushed Stanley back against a rock, eyes closed but mouth open, still breathing, and turned on the dervish as another jumped into the water the other side of the rocks. Nicholas waded forward and smacked the knife out of the Bektaşi’s hand with his forearm and then grabbed him by his bony shoulders and unbalanced him by pulling him abruptly forward into the water. The dervish came up spluttering, the blood of his enemies washing from his dark skin. It was horrible to feel the weight of the fanatic buoyed in the water, as light as a child. For many years he had fasted his frame down to nothing but skin and bone for the love of Allah, and so it was with ease that Nicholas gripped his head under the chin and smashed it back against the boulder once, twice, three times, until even his fanatic arms had no strength, and his skull no longer knocked on the stone but made a wet, soft noise. The dervish never gave a blow with his long thin axe.

The other was swimming round to him but frenziedly, flapping like a dog. Nicholas swam out to him and took the dagger from between his teeth and raised it high and stabbed down into the floundering swimmer’s skinny back. The dervish’s head went below the water. He stabbed and stabbed and stabbed until the white sea foam turned pink in the sinless moonlight, and he knew he had lost all restraint and become merely murderous and all his boyhood innocence was gone.

The air was filled with shouts, they were calling urgently for musketeers to come up and kill these two fugitive wretches. But he paid no more heed to the bloody wreck of Elmo behind him, nor the blood-stained promontory of Sciberras. He pulled Stanley out into the water and draped him on his back over the middle of the spar. The spar sunk down only a little, Stanley’s fair locks trailing in the water, his beard beaded with pearls, eyes closed, but breathing, still breathing.

Then he pushed the weight out over the water, and gripped the near end, and began to kick.

At any moment, another might have been swimming beside him, slicing into him. Or musket balls peppering the water around him, and then his world going red and then black. But it never happened. He never knew why.

The Birgu shore seemed as far distant as some uncharted coast of the Americas.

He would never know how long he kicked, panted, rested, sometimes flopped over onto his back and lay floating in the salt sea of the great harbour, unable to move either himself or his friend another yard. And then after perhaps five minutes, the stars moving visibly overhead, and shouts and cries still coming from the inferno of Elmo, he would roll over again on his front and rest his chin on the half-submerged spar of timber, seawater flowing over his face, and kick forward that way, arms draped without strength, turning his face aside to take breath, stopping more and more frequently, kicking less and less, drifting often.

Lights twinkled on the Birgu shore, but they seemed more like a taunt than comfort. So far away.

Where the water streamed past the jagged ends of the spars as they inched forward, he saw clouds of glowing green phosphorescence. Drowned stars.

The five hundred yard crossing took him perhaps two or three hours. At any time a sharp-eyed sniper on Is-Salvatur might yet have tried to hit him in the water by moonlight. But he felt strangely past caring. He rested and kicked and rested. What would be would be. He could do no more.

A little later as he lay on his back, and Elmo looked a little further off, the high walls of San Angelo loomed a little nearer, he sucked in air and began to feel light-headed. Almost as if he might start to laugh. He knew it was only exhaustion.

On the heights of Sciberras there was immense activity by torchlight and lantern light and the bright aid of the moon. Not at Elmo, but westward at the vast Ottoman camp, and around the trenches and gun platforms. They were already being dismantled. He tried to see with his tired, salt-bleared eyes. The tents and pavilions were being taken down, the great guns roped and craned onto the massive wheeled wagons. He could hear the oxen bellow and low as they were driven into their teams and the thick leather yokes set on their muscled backs once more. He could hear the roll of the heavy ironbound wheels, perhaps even the ground and the water trembling under that massive weight. And many men marching away by orange torchlight, a drum sounding, standards raised high in the night. Then he could have laughed.

They were breaking camp already. The moment Elmo fell, Mustafa Pasha had given the order. They were already pulling back off Sciberras, returning past the low-lying Marsa, and over the Corradino Heights to Santa Margherita and the ruins of its ancient monastery. They were coming back to Birgu, the greatest prize, and the key to the island of Malta.

It could be as soon as dawn tomorrow that the great brazen guns would begin to roar again. Elmo would lie deathly quiet, smouldering, forgotten. And he and Stanley had escaped the quiet of that grave, to swim back into the cannon’s mouth once more.

He could have laughed.

With the last defenders tortured to death or beheaded, none having uttered a word under torture, Mustafa Pasha rode back to make a final survey of the paltry ruins. As he sat on his white horse in the moonlight, he revolved in his mind the figures: eighteen thousand cannonballs used, some seventy thousand pounds of gunpowder. About a fifth of their supplies. Cannonballs could be retrieved and re-used, some of them. But they had no access to more gunpowder except from Stamboul herself, nearly a thousand miles away. Worst of all was the cost in Turkish and allied dead. The siege of Elmo alone had consumed nearly a quarter of his forces. Some eight thousand dead or wounded beyond fighting more. Against some two or three hundred defenders. It was scarcely credible.

Then he lifted up his stony eyes and gazed across the Grand Harbour.

From Birgu rose a great curtain of silence, high into the starlit sky. In response to the tragic spectacle of valiant Elmo, valiant beyond words, now fallen at last, and with the banner of a false and arrogant religion polluting its walls, there came only a grave and mighty silence.

In the heart of the night, many brothers and citizens gathered on the walls of the city to witness the death of the little fort that had died for them. And as often with the death of a loved one, relative or friend, silence was the truest expression of grief.

Even Mustafa Pasha spoke little as he surveyed the devastation, the bodies, and eyed with distaste the various mutilations practised on the corpses by the laughing, maddened Bektaşis.

‘In the name of Allah,’ he was heard to murmur, looking across to Birgu once more. ‘If the son has cost us so much, what will the father cost us?’