The Great Siege

1

Nicholas came back to Birgu as he arrived at Elmo before, not knowing when or how. The two broken refugees were hauled from the water by stout fishermen on the Kalkara shore, just below the walls of San Angelo, and given watered wine to drink. Nicholas knelt, for he could not yet stand, and put the trembling cup to his lips and gulped it down. He thought he was at the Mass. Then he handed the cup to the figure beside him. His eyes and understanding were so blurred, he did not know exactly who it was.

The fishermen helped them and they both stood upright with great effort, swaying, barely seeing or hearing, their senses far way. But exhausted as they were, something fresh coursed in their veins, along with the wine and water. They were back in the city. Birgu. They had escaped Elmo. Their brothers were all slain there.

Stanley said, his voice his own once more, ‘And we only are alone escaped to tell thee.’

The wound to his head ran with fresh blood thinned with saltwater, his fair hair was darkly plastered, his wounds too many to count, his clothes like Nicholas’s own a disgrace of blackened and bloody tatters. Yet they both lived, and with their full senses. The healing power of seawater was deep and mysterious. Along with all the deep sorrow of Elmo’s fall, and the bitterness of this war that had barely begun, they felt a surge of powerful contradictory joy: the ancient primitive joy of the survivor.

Around them the people and then more and more knights came to greet them and look on with wonder and relief. Young boys ran off to spread the word that though Elmo was indeed fallen, yet two had escaped alive, and before long the word was all over the town. La Valette was immediately informed, and according to his prompt orders, in the heart of the night, aged sacristans shuffled up darkened spiral stairways in cobwebbed towers to ring solitary stark iron bells. It was the second time the bells of Birgu’s churches had rung tonight, the first time with a more direful peel. The two fugitives had not heard that earlier peel across the water, their ears deafened and bleeding with the roar of cannon.

In response to the joyful tolling of bells, heads turned and glared across the water from the Turkish column. Mustafa’s eyes burned black. What were the slaves celebrating now? No help had come. No help would come. Ottoman intelligence was sure. The Christians had as much sense of unity and brotherhood as weasels fighting in a hole.

Nicholas and Stanley looked at each other and then embraced. Two figures that might have come up from the deep ocean, or from another world imagined by the poets. A man and a boy, who had that look in their eyes and that strength in their bearing, however weakened their frames, of two who had walked with death for many days and weeks and not been destroyed by it.

The scene was unreal after the abattoir of Elmo. People lined the streets and cheered as if in nocturnal starlit fiesta, torches blazing, faces smiling and people calling out blessings on the heroes and curses on the coming Turks, arms raised, fists clenched. The streets eerily untouched as yet by cannon fire and war.

The two went down the Street of the Knights unwillingly in the role of returning heroes, still feeling themselves to be but the last pitiful pair of refugees from a grievous loss. But to the people they were warriors from the ballads and stories, and women sang and cast flowers, rose petals and sprigs of rosemary, and men clapped their shoulders and hailed them as brothers.

Nicholas could have fainted, or dropped to his knees and sobbed, but he and Stanley walked steadily thorough all the magic and the unreality of the moment, nodding graciously, knowing that for the people to celebrate now, with such zeal, was far more important than their own private sentiments. An ancient Jewish fiddler pushed forward through the crowd and walked along behind them in their torchlit procession, playing a stately Spanish dance, a courtly pavane. The two of them, knight and boy, stained with blood and salt and exhausted beyond speech, had spoken barely a word since crawling ashore, not a word in reply to the clamorous questions and the showers of praise, but gazed mutely with surging sorrow and remembrance of horror and comrades lost, and of the great wordless gulf that separates those who have lived through war from those who have not.

But now all around them and their sorrowful silence there was laughter and music and dancing as if this night was fair day or high holiday. Maidens crying to see such heroes among men, men admiring, and the two of them stepping forward to the tune of this sweet melancholy pavane, all passion under immaculate restraint and formal ceremony, like all courtly dances, and walking in measure to the music. More street musicians joined the aged Jew, and the music swelled.

Then through the crowd which shimmered and moved apart, there came a figure, and she reached out towards the boy. Like two of the courtliest dancers in all of Europe, a gentleman and his fine lady, she held out her slim hand upward, palm outward, and they touched palms as pilgrims do. She wore a pale blue dress, her only dress, and amid all the laughter and folly and rejoicing around them, as if the worst was not yet to come, her dark eyes fixed upon him with deadly seriousness, and no one else was there. There was only the battered bloodied boy soldier and the slim virgin girl. Their palms touched, and they turned and danced, moved left and then turned and back, to the slow stately pavane, the Jewish fiddler and his fellows picking up the time. The boy’s exhaustion was great, he moved slowly, and the fiddlers played with it.

All the people looked on at this strange sight, falling quiet. It was the Inglis boy, the Insulter, come back from Elmo to dance in the street like a prince with the daughter of Franco Briffa. She was still a maiden pure, you could tell, but in the expression of each of them there was such a love that burned, and in the deadly seriousness of their young eyes, his a Northern sea blue and hers the colour of Malta honey.

Franco Briffa also saw, and his jaw fell open. These two loved like none other. ‘Dios mio,’ he muttered. There had never been such love as theirs. Some looked on and remembered the love they had known when they were young, and some longed to know such love, and some felt the most aching regret that they would never know such a love as this of these two stately dancers, the slim Malta girl and the bloodstained boy, dancing in the Street of the Knights, as if no one else lived in the world with them but they alone.

Only hours later, soon after sunrise the next day, guns booming, banners flying, casting giant crinkled shadows over the sea before it as it came, the Ottoman fleet sailed safe at last into harbour in Marsamuscetto. The Turkish force, with all its supplies, munitions and material, was now on the very doorstep of San Angelo and Birgu.

Another departure was little noted, and went without gun salutes and fanfare. A small galley departed for Tripoli, bearing in a casket the corpse of Dragut Rais.

Nicholas slept a day and a night in the Sacred Infirmary, given drugged wine, barely conscious of the chaplain physicians ministering to him. When he came to, Smith and Hodge were by his bedside.

‘You’re …’

‘Both still in the land of the living,’ said Smith, a faint smile showing through his black beard. ‘God wanted me here still.’

‘Right as rain,’ said Hodge equably. His arm was still in plaster.

‘But what about-’

‘He’s fine,’ said Smith gently. ‘He needs a lot of rest. But he’ll mend. He’s made of ox leather and oakwood. Here’ — he fumbled for something in his jerkin — ‘you know that in the days of ancient Rome, a man who saved the life of a fellow citizen, such as Coriolanus, was crowned with the oak-leaf cluster. Well, I could find no oaks on this blasted island. So,’ he tossed something into Nicholas’s sheeted lap, ‘I give you this.’

It was a lemon.

‘I am honoured,’ said Nicholas gravely.

‘The honour, though, is all real,’ said Smith, and he was serious again. ‘You saved Stanley’s life.’

‘He wanted to remain at Elmo. To die there.’

‘He was wrong. As was I. We are needed here.’ He looked about the beautiful hall of the infirmary, but seeing things far off. ‘Or we soon will be.’

Fra Reynaud said he could leave that evening.

‘You had more than one interesting wound that could have killed or unlimbed you had it been half an inch different. That musket ball that ploughed across the back of your skull when you were swimming. Impressive. Perhaps you ducked just in time.’

Nicholas felt gingerly. There was a wide crust of scab across the back of his head.

‘How you went on from there, I do not know. But I have seen many wounded men perform miracles of endurance. You are among them.’

He felt himself colouring with pride, and to cover it he asked, ‘What else? My elbow?’

‘Otherwise cuts and bruises. A wide cut to your flank that you probably never even noticed.’

He shook his head. ‘No, I-’

‘Sewn with six stitches and healing well. And your elbow, another very lucky strike indeed. Another half inch in and you’d have lost your arm. As it was, the ball took a flap of skin with it, a chip or two of bone, and drove another chip far under your skin as it passed. Still there.’

‘Really?’

‘Butcher surgeons always go digging around trying to get things out of a man’s flesh,’ said Fra Reynaud dryly. ‘Often better to leave them in. Many’s the time I’ve wrapped up a knight with a musket ball still in him. It does no harm. It’s your bone, isn’t it? It’ll dissolve away eventually, I expect. No point digging you up and you losing more blood, is there?’

‘But — it can strengthen a man to lose blood, can it not? Balance his humours? I thought Galen-’

‘Galen,’ said Fra Reynaud with a sudden flash in his eyes. ‘Hippocrates. Don’t speak to me of the Greeks, the theory of humours, miasmas, all those notions of theirs.’ He leaned close to the boy and whispered, as if passing on the direst heresy, ‘All the best of the Hospitallers’ knowledge of medicine, we learnt from the Saracens.’

Then he stood swiftly, appeared to give just the faintest wink, and departed.

‘Fra Reynaud!’ he called after him.

Reynaud stopped. ‘I am busy, boy.’

‘Just one thing. What is the date?’

He looked back. ‘You have no idea?’

‘None.’

‘It is now the Eve of St John, the 23rd of June. Elmo that should have fallen after two or three days at most, stood for one day short of a month.’ He smiled.

Nicholas’s head sank back. Thirty days. Sweet Jesu, it felt like it.

He walked south through the narrow, deep-shadowed streets of the little town, and to the steps below the great curtain wall, three times the height of Elmo’s defences. Vast quantities of earthen sacks, backed with huge timber props and well-placed stones, bulked up the walls from behind, so that even a direct hit with the biggest ball in the Ottoman artillery might be absorbed and do little damage. Such was the hope.

From the top of the walls, he greeted the soldiers there and they did not know he was from Elmo so he said nothing. Looking out towards the stony heights south, golden in the setting sun, he saw a horribly familiar sight. Great gun emplacements and platforms being erected, well shielded and protected, and the smaller guns being craned into place already. Between the guns and walls, ominous gouges and mean trenches beginning to run through the rocky ground, where the Turkish forward troops and the miners were creeping up to the base of Birgu’s walls. Over before Senglea, it was just the same. They ran through the earth like the cracks of some slow motion, infinitely sinister earthquake.

That evening there washed up on the shores of Kalkara a horror unspeakable.

Word was sent to La Valette, and he came running down to the harbour wall. There floating below were three great crucifixes made from lashed spars, and tied to them in savage mockery of the Passion were the naked bodies of three Hospitallers from Elmo. They were headless, mutilated and degraded beyond recognition.

The people of the town looked down aghast at the nightmare scene, their hearts chilled within them. Was this the fate that awaited them when the Turks came? Was this what they would do even to their children? What kind of an enemy were they facing? Even the warm and passionate blood of Malta ran cold. How could they fight such devils, and so many? Their faith faltered.

La Valette himself seemed frozen in horror for a moment. He was heard to mutter just two words under his breath. ‘Christ re-crucified. ’

Then he gave angry orders that the foul flotsam should be brought up with all care and reverence, the bodies untied from the spars and washed and censed and prepared for burial. The spars should be burnt.

His white silent rage was terrible to behold. His lips worked as he watched the blue bodies carried away, signs of the cross carved into their bare chests with daggers.

Then he gave a further order. None dared to question it, for to do so was to break their vow of obedience, though it went against the old rules of chivalry. Some said that this was no longer a war that could be fought to the old rules of chivalry, and others said that without such rules to ennoble and purify it, the business of war was but the business of butchery, and there was no choosing between good and evil.

They brought up the eight Turkish prisoners that they had already captured in the last few days in sallies from Birgu, careless scouts, and one prospective miner who had foolishly been surveying the walls a little too close. They came up from the deep dungeons of San Angelo, blinking even in the dimming twilight. The guards led them in chains up to the gun platform and unchained and beheaded them, despite their pathetic last pleas, and then their still-turbanned heads were rammed into the mouths of the guns there and fired across the harbour towards the Turkish encampment.

Curious what this seemingly random cannon fire might be, the Turks sent down slaves to see, and minutes later they dredged from the waters of Marsa the eight tattered heads and brought them to Mustafa’s pavilion. He set down his cup and nodded. He understood.

La Valette further ordered there to be no public display of grief for the fall of Elmo nor for the mutilation of these knights. ‘Neither grief nor surrender,’ he said harshly to the captains of the langues, his fists clenched on the tabletop.

Since all proceeded as appointed by Heaven, why should they grieve? Their brother knights had done their duty, they had fought most valiantly, and died in the service of Jesus Christ. Grief and tears were a womanish insult.

‘Let the bodies be laid to rest with all due dignity,’ he said. ‘Then let us return to our posts, and be ready to fight and die as they did.’