The Great Siege

3

‘Can we truly defeat such an army?’ asked Franco Briffa. ‘We have seen the numbers of the Turks, and they are as numberless as the sands of the shore. Their guns are like dragons, a child could curl up and sleep in the mouth of one. Their trenches advance daily to our walls like snakes. We are so few, mere people of the land and the sea. You believe we can defeat them? You who survived Elmo?’

‘Yes,’ said Nicholas. ‘Yes I do.’

But the boy looked away as he spoke and did not meet his eyes. And Franco Briffa knew he was lying to him, though it was a noble lie.

That night, Franco Briffa held his wife very close to him. In the morning, she watched him go over to the cradle and take up the bambino and hold the gurgling smiling infant very close to his chest, tears running down his face, and she went and held them both in a human trinity.

‘When will they come?’ people asked. ‘When will the guns start to roar?’

They kept looking out to sea, for the sight of Spanish or Papal galleys. None came.

The waiting was terrible, and though the preaching of Roberto di Eboli had put fire in their hearts, yet it was beginning to die again. They were trapped in their little town, surrounded, and no one was coming to help. The villages beyond were laid waste and desolate, and the size and number of the Turkish guns, glimpsed from the walls, ranging up against them line on line, was truly terrifying. Elmo, that had seemed such a heroic tragedy lately, now seemed like the stirring up of a hornet’s nest. There would be no mercy.

La Valette and the more experienced knights knew why the guns were still silent. It was not only them that would begin the battle. Mustafa was preparing other means. When it began, everything would come at once. And the three thousand fighting men, knights and soldiers, bakers and shoemakers and apprentice boys and urchins — they would not be enough.

It was to people’s amazement then that news spread that Mustafa Pasha had sent a messenger to parley. He was proposing terms.

It was an old Greek slave who came and stood before the post of Provence, carrying a white banner. He was led to La Valette.

‘Mustafa Pasha,’ he stammered, ‘Supreme Commander of the Ottoman Forces of Suleiman, Lord of the Universe, Possessor of Men’s Necks, Viceroy of Allah, Master of the Two-’

‘Suleiman’s nicknames do not interest me,’ cut in La Valette icily. ‘What is your message?’

‘My, my master,’ faltered the poor Greek slave, as old as La Valette but a good deal more decayed, ‘decrees that if you depart from this island as you once departed from Rhodes, without further resistance, you would be granted free and unmolested passage to Sicily. Not a shot will be fired, not a man, woman nor child harmed.’

‘Let the people know this for certain,’ said La Valette, turning sharply to Oliver Starkey. ‘The Turks want terms. It means they fear they may not be able to beat us. Let the town know. Let it put the fire back in their hearts.’ He snapped back to the slave. ‘And if we do not depart from this our island, gifted to us by the Emperor Charles himself?’

The slave looked anxious in the extreme. ‘Then, then your fate will be that of your slaughtered comrades at Elmo, now,’ he gulped, ‘now in the hell of the Unbelievers.’

La Valette towered over him. ‘Where?’

‘In the hell,’ he stammered, ‘of, of — ’

‘You say that our Christian brothers burn in hell?’

The old wretch fell to his knees, whimpering and cowering, well used to heavy blows. ‘Not I, master, I beg you, not I, I but carry the message …’

La Valette turned from him in disgust. A man whose spirit had leached away with his youth.

‘And then what?’ he murmured, more to himself than the slave. ‘The Turks will come on to Sicily soon enough, and then that island too will be a part of the Caliphate. As Rhodes is now.’ He turned back. ‘And then Rome, yes? Venice, and Genoa, and Marseilles, and inland, all of Western Europe. Another army will swarm over the Danube frontier, and all of Christendom will be a part of the Empire of Islam, and Christians once more reduced to servile dhimmi status, taxed and spat on and beaten in the streets, as Jews and Christians are today throughout the East.’ His voice trembled. ‘Where then will we go with our Bible and our Cross? Will the Turk gracefully allow us to depart for the New World, do you think? Or perhaps the Moon?’

The slave trembled and said nothing.

‘I reject the offer of Mustafa Pasha,’ said La Valette. ‘Here we take our stand. On this bare rock.’ He tapped the stone flag with his foot. ‘Here.’ He flicked his fingers at a soldier. ‘Take him away and hang him.’

‘No, master, mercy!’ cried the old wretch.

Even the soldier hesitated. It was a cruel order.

La Valette considered, his thoughts dark and labyrinthine, comprehending the power of every threat and counter threat, every gesture, small and great, and above all, the desperate straits of Malta.

‘Bandage his eyes and lead him back to the Gate of Provence,’ he said. ‘Take him up on the walls. I will follow.’

The old slave was dragged back to the walls and held at the very tottering edge, in sight of the Turks, and the bandage torn away. He stared down into the deep ditch far below.

‘Mark it well,’ said La Valette.

The old man looked up the Grand Master with his wrinkled toothless mouth agape, and then down again into the ditch.

‘The Turks will never take this place,’ said La Valette. He fixed his ice blue eyes on the shaking slave, gripped by the arms between the two soldiers. ‘Return to Mustafa and say this. Tell him he may have possession of the ditch below, with our most heartfelt blessing, to lay the dead bodies of his Janizaries in. Beyond that — he will have nothing.’

The slave went back to the Ottoman camp, walking awkwardly, for he had dirtied his breeches.

Mustafa’s anger would be terrible. But not so terrible as the ice blue eyes and the even voice of that Grand Master. A sincere madness burned in him.

Mustafa heard, rolled up a map, looked out of the door of his pavilion and said, ‘When we capture Birgu and Senglea, every man, woman and child there will die. La Valette has sentenced them to death.’

Among the townspeople there was murmuring and lamenting, but no revolt. They had always been governed by distant aristocrats, Maltese and Spanish and now Hospitaller. And the Grand Master had now decreed that they must fight.

With all their ancient peasant fatalism they sighed, ‘So be it,’ and set to sharpening their billhooks and scythes.

Out across the island, over the arid plateau, in the coastal ravines and in the shadows of the devastated and fire-blackened villages, the people of Birgu heard rumours that their brothers were already waging war. The magical, talismanic name of Tonio Bajada, folk hero to some, bandit to others, was leading a group of partisans, harrying the Turkish patrols wherever they could. Rumour said that another band of partisans had caught one Turk, isolated from his squad, cut off his head and replaced it with that of a pig. They had left him sitting up against a dry stone wall for his comrades to find. Minutes later the Turkish patrol came by, and their howls of execration were a delight to the ear.

In another village, still sparsely inhabited, they caught an Italian renegade who was working for the Turks, keeping lookout on the headland. They tied him to the tail of a mule, and some children beat him to death with sticks. Even as he lay dying in a pool of his own blood, he told them, ‘If not today, tomorrow will be your last.’

‘Yah! Yah! Yah!’ the children sang round him.

‘This will be a most brutal encounter,’ said Franco Briffa, head bowed. ‘I will kill Turks with my bare hands if I have to. They have come to my island, I did not invite them, and they have come bearing arms. Yet already my islanders are turning brutal, recounting such tales with glee, of pigs’ heads, and desecrations, and child executioners. Already my friend, the bastard Anton Zahra, talks of how he is longing to take Mohammedan scalps, and show them to his grandchildren one day. Even if we do survive’ — he looked up and fixed his eyes hard on Nicholas — ‘like any who engage in killing, we will leave something of our Christian souls behind us. In ashes and tatters.’

La Valette had been uncharacteristically hesitant about giving another defensive order, in case it struck dread into the people. But then he decided it must be done, and he ordered all streets nearest to the landwalls to be barricaded at regular intervals, and cul-de-sacs formed as entrapments. The people understood immediately what it implied. The Grand Master and the knights were expecting the Turks to break in through the walls soon enough, and desperate hand-to-hand fighting to take place in every street.

They did not lose heart. Nicholas and Hodge watched, deeply moved, as the people of this poorest, most barren of islands dragged forth from their houses what little furniture and possessions they had, chairs and tables and ancient linen chests, smashing some of them into spars and timbers. Then they nailed them up into makeshift fencing, preceded by sets of three or four spars lashed together in the centre with strong rope to form a kind of jack or caltrop, of the kind used to trip up horses in former times. Some even took picks and poleaxes to their own outhouses and piggeries and stableblocks, and dragged the stones into the street to make further barricades. They created narrowing funnels into squares and courtyards without exits. They worked through the heat of the midday sun, half naked and sweating, coughing, plastered in dust, without one murmur of complaint.

Knights watched them at these peasant labours, and said among themselves that these low-born people over whom they had haughtily ruled for decades, barely noticing them, were in some ways as brave as crusaders. They began to say that it would be an honour to fight for them.

‘To fight with them, you mean,’ said Stanley. ‘To fight alongside them.’

Nicholas was in the courtyard, sewing up his battered leather jerkin. He glanced up and there was Maddalena standing before him, her hands folded. She was annoyed that he had not paid her more attention.

‘In my country,’ she said, ‘girls must insult the boys they like very strongly. It is a custom.’

He looked down again at his work. ‘Flirting, we call that,’ he said. ‘The village girls do that in my country too.’

‘The more they like him, the more they must insult him. In the street, before all his friends. Especially the boy they would like to marry.’

‘So what would you say to me?’

She clapped her hands. At last she had his attention. ‘I would say you are puny and feeble, and as thin as an anchovy!’

‘Thank you.’

She giggled, the tip of her tongue between her teeth. ‘Your clothes are dusty and torn like the clothes of a vagabond-’

‘I am a vagabond.’

‘And your nose is red because of the sun, and peeling like the bark of a sickly tree — but otherwise your fair skin is pale like a woman’s. Like a spoilt princess’s in a palace.’

‘Hm.’

‘And also your nose has a white scar down the side, where the Turks slit it when you were captured. And you have bruises all over you and scars like an old fighting dog.’

He looked up. ‘But that means I’m brave, doesn’t it?’

‘In my country, it is not the custom for a girl to say nice things to the boy she likes. We should be cold and haughty, and throw insults in his face, to test him.’

He tried to take her by the hand, but she slipped away and twirled, laughing again. Flirting.

‘When a girl insults a boy like this,’ she said, gesturing dramatically, ‘if he becomes indignant and angry and sulks, then we know he is a weak man, with the heart of a little boy still. A real man will just laugh at the insulting. He will toss back his head, and put his hands on his hips like this’ — she tossed back her long hair which she knew to be so lovely, and imitated what she thought was a manly stance — ‘and he will laugh aloud. Because a real man has greater things to become angry about. We say, an eagle does not catch flies. A real man does not trouble himself with petty things.’

‘Such as what women say to him.’

‘You are wicked!’

He laughed. She wanted to kiss him again. He was an eagle. But her mother came with the washing, and they looked away from each other with faces lowered, and did not see her mother suppress a smile as she reached down into her basket.

‘Nicholas,’ said Maria, ‘go and find the boys. They are playing out in the street somewhere. It is time to eat soon.’

Nicholas found Mateo and Tito play-fighting in the dust, rolling into a pyramid of small cannonballs, and yelled out to them. One of them had a little dagger, and when Nicholas yelled out, he cut his brother on the arm and the other boy howled. Nicholas seized them both by the scruff of their tattered shirts and dragged them to their feet. He kicked the wicked little dagger from the first’s hand, none too gently, and trod on it.

Tito nursed his cut arm.

‘Little idiots,’ rasped Nicholas. ‘You think the medical chaplains haven’t enough to do without stitching up urchins like you?’

He grabbed Tito’s thin arm and examined it. It could have been worse. ‘Now home and ask your mother to douse it in vinegar,’ he said.

‘Will it hurt?’ said Tito, looking up at him wide-eyed.

‘Like hell,’ said Nicholas unsympathetically.

‘Will I die?’

‘One day.’

‘But we are going to have to fight, aren’t we?’ said Mateo.

‘No you are not.’

‘We are. We are too few. Or we will be made slaves in Algiers, and I have heard stories of that.’

Not as bad as the truth, Nicholas hoped. Stories of boys as young as these two, held in the boy brothels of that fetid pirate port, their arms and legs amputated, for the sick pleasures of their captors. Boys held in Istanbul in ‘peg-brothels’, waiting for their customers, seated naked on wooden pegs for … ease of access.

‘Come home,’ he said.

‘Can I have my knife back?’

He kicked it over to him.

Mateo said, ‘I’ll need it when the Turks come.’

‘Home,’ he said again wearily. ‘And stay home.’

After supper Nicholas went up onto the walls again, and found Smith and Stanley beside the Post of Germany. They were listening to the Turks singing and chanting in the forward camp, not four hundred yards off. They could have tried firing cannonballs into them from the bastions even now, but La Valette had said hold. Time enough to fire when they came.

‘They are singing like they sung before Elmo,’ said Nicholas. ‘The night before they attacked.’

Smith nodded. ‘It will start very soon.’

The voices of the imams rose and fell, the guttural flowing Arabic phrases for the ninety-nine names of God. The stars shining, the fires burning. It had a strange beauty.

Later Nicholas heard a faint lone voice in a forward trench, and to his surprise, almost amusement, the sound of a stringed instrument. Some homesick soldier singing an old song.

‘A poem by Ibn Zaydun,’ murmured Stanley. ‘A poet of Moorish Andaluz, centuries ago.’ Nicholas looked at him startled, but he did not explain further. Rather he translated.

‘Two secrets in the heart of Night

We lay, until the light

Of interfering Day

Gave both of us away.’

Smith harrumphed, but Stanley’s expression was distant.

‘Aye,’ he said softly, head tilted back against the low ramparts, eyes half closed. ‘They are men much like us. They bleed red when cut, they grieve to grow older, they sing verses, they fall in love … Hard it is to fight them, when you understand this much.’