The Great Siege

6

The Turks surged victoriously over the bare promontory of Senglea, firing the few mean huts and the windmills with glee, and hacking down anyone who opposed them. They opened the gates of the settlement to their forward trenches and gunnery teams, who dragged in smaller guns by hand immediately, and set them up on the east side of Senglea, turning on Birgu at short range just across Galley Creek. After nightfall they would drag up the bigger guns.

The panicked defenders felt as if all Christendom had shrunk back to just Malta, and now Elmo and Senglea were lost too, all that remained of the island was huddled Birgu itself. A trapped animal, surrounded by hostile guns: the last redoubt and stand, the tattered remnant of the once vast domain of the Knights of St John. A few mean streets, churches, a fort, a half-wrecked hospital. Barely two hundred knights still able to fight.

The forces over-running Senglea were jubilant and numerous but ragged in formation. Suddenly the gates of the tiny single-square fort of St Michel slammed open, and out marched a small but close-packed column of armoured men. Perhaps no more than thirty in number, they bristled with pikes and swords, and in a cold, efficient silence, they began to slice through the milling, rejoicing Turks and corsairs.

At their head was a heavily armoured knight who sliced and slashed with wordless slaughter, uttering never a sound, a terrifying steel automaton amid the flames and gun smoke. It was the Marshal Copier himself, and by his side fought Henri Parisot. Seemingly invulnerable, Copier cut down half-naked Turks to left and to right, moving slow and implacable amid the carnage, his fine fluted greaves and cuisses gleaming silver and red, his olive-wood peg-leg thumping over the dusty ground. Steadily the column cut a swathe across Senglea promontory. The Turkish commander, Yacoub Agha, saw what was happening and called his men back into some kind of formation. The last few ragged defenders, Nicholas running among them, all youthful dreams of glory gone, had their chance to dash for the pontoon bridge on the eastern side, and flee across to Birgu.

The armoured knight and his closest comrades held the head of the pontoon now, and the Turks came against them in far stricter order. Behind them, St Michel was already fallen, the last defenders there beheaded and tumbled over onto the rocks below for the gulls. The standard of Suleiman flew from the bastion.

The moment St Michel was fallen, her captured guns were turned back to fire across at San Angelo, and long lean rowing boats nosed out round the end of Senglea. Well bulwarked with pavisades of wool and cotton bales, men crouching behind them, muskets smouldering, they made for the great chain across Galley Creek. Now La Valette could see them himself, he needed no reports. The battle spread out below him. Birgu, the last isolated outpost on the tiny island that still held out against the might of the Ottoman Empire, was now truly under attack from all sides.

He knew who that was coming round to the chain. It was Candelissa, the Greek renegade, and his band of cut-throats. They held half the Aegean throttled in a reign of terror, and none were more savage in their cruelties. If anyone on some small, sparse island resisted paying them their ‘taxation’, Candelissa had no hesitation in having the population of the entire island killed. Their heads were collected in sacks and sent to Topkapı Sarayı for the Sultan’s approval. They had opposed his God-appointed rule, and were therefore heretics as well as rebels. It amused Candelissa to have the sacks of heads carefully labelled by age and sex. ‘Old men.’ ‘Crones.’ ‘Women expectant.’ ‘Suckling infants.’

La Valette sent out his orders.

Standing at the back of his galliot, Candelissa cried to his corsairs that Birgu itself was already taken from the landward walls, and they would soon be in for the loot. A lookout heard his lie from the battlements of San Angelo, and La Valette promptly had a gigantic banner of the Cross raised over the post of Germany at the landward end. The corsairs saw it going up and looked puzzled.

A Spanish soldier with a fine musket said, ‘I could hit the swine even from here, Sire, I’m sure of it. Top him off like a nettle in the field.’

‘No,’ said La Valette. ‘I want them in closer.’

Candelissa and his men could do nothing against the great chain or the massive posts at either end, sunk into the rock and thickly mortared. The Sultan’s flagship herself couldn’t drag them free. His galliots drifted uncertainly. No one fired down on them from San Angelo above.

‘The scum are almost out of gunpowder!’ yelled Candelissa. His men grinned.

La Valette looked across to the ruins of Senglea.

Yacoub Agha strode into the turreted gun room of St Michel, eyeing the guns turned on San Angelo just across Galley Creek.

‘None of them spiked, you are certain?’

‘None, Lord,’ said the master gunner confidently. ‘They never had time.’

Yet Yacoub Agha felt uneasy. Something was wrong. He wished he was far away from this gun room, from this accursed island. Something prickled on his skin.

‘Shall we fire?’ said the gunner.

Suddenly he knew. ‘No gun has been fired yet?’

‘No, Lord.’

‘Then why can I smell burning matchcord?’

The gun team stared around. Then one of them glanced down and saw the corner of a trapdoor to the stores below, just showing beneath a piece of sacking. Laid across the trapdoor just recently, to hide it.

‘Allah,’ he murmured.

One of the men leaned down to move the sacking.

‘No!’ cried Yacoub Agha.

Six fat barrels of gunpowder detonated in deafening unison. The wooden platform of St Michel’s gun tower, heavy Sicilian oak though it was, virtually vapourised in an instant. The tower erupted like a small volcano, entire stone blocks thrown into the air in a huge black spout of earth and smoke and cindered mortar. In the heart of the dark fountain, to the music of that deafening roar, dead bodies turned and flailed like burnt and ashen children doing cartwheels in the sky.

At the pontoon bridge, men on both sides stopped and stared, mouths agape. Then battle was rejoined, the last few armoured knights standing their ground and hacking furiously at the vast press of enraged Turks, while their brethren fled back to Birgu behind them across the rocking pontoon.

Candelissa too looked back at the tatters of St Michel and then stared up at the high battlements of San Angelo. They had known. Those Christian dogs had known.

Another figure appeared on the battlements of San Angelo, too dark against the bright sky to see his face, but distinctively tall and wearing an imposing plumed helmet. It was La Valette. For a moment, Candelissa and he seemed to lock their gaze on each other. Then the figure raised his arm, and another shout went out, and Candelissa felt a shadow fall across him.

Almost at the water’s edge, from the heart of the solid rock below San Angelo, the muzzles of cannon appeared where no cannon should be. They poked out through tiny, rough-cut wooden-shuttered niches. Black, unblinking eyes. Most of the corsairs did not even see them. They had been thinking of climbing over the chain and swimming in below Birgu. The battle must be almost over now, depsite that last little kick of resistance on Senglea. Some even had their knives between their teeth, ready to go.

Then they saw their bearded commander, the dread of the world, Candelissa. His hands were outstretched as if to ward something off, and his eyes were wide with terror.

No more than twenty yards away, those black unblinking muzzles flared out in flame, the concealed battery below San Angelo opening up with all four guns firing as one. They fired grapeshot and chain shot, packets of jagged steel and nails, spiked balls and bags of sharp stones, and the lacerating cloud flew out across the water like a storm of hellish insects and tore into the faces and flanks of the half-naked corsairs and turned the very air to a bloody mist.

The guns reloaded.

One or two boats at the back still had enough oarsmen alive to try a desperate retreat.

Other torn survivors leapt or rolled almost paralysed with wounds into the water. Some fainted with shock and pain at the salt. The guns roared a second time, and the boards of the crowded galliots were swept almost clean of life. Snipers on Birgu’s walls finished off the few who continued to swim.

La Valette sent not a word of congratulation. The waterline battery had simply done as commanded. Perhaps two or three hundred assorted Turks, Saracens and Algerians had been killed in a minute or two. The explosion in St Michel had killed at least another fifty.

An hour later, Mustafa Pasha learnt of the figures, and that both Candelissa and Yacoub Agha were dead.

‘What of the attack of the Janizaries on the land walls of Birgu?’

‘Beaten back, Pasha, with great loss of life.’

‘Numbers there?’

‘A wave of one thousand went in. Many fewer returned.’

‘How many fewer?’

The messenger looked at his feet. ‘Perhaps two hundred.’

Slowly his vast army was bleeding away. No, not even slowly. He had lost well over a thousand men this morning. The people of the town were evidently fighting shoulder to shoulder with the knights whom, his intelligence had told him, they despised as their arrogant overlords. Mere low-born fishermen, barefoot and ragged, they now fought on the walls with those pork-eating Crusader dogs as valiantly as any. Curse them.

A thousand of his men slain since dawn. Forty more days like today, and the entire Ottoman army would be exterminated. Not a single soul would return alive to Stamboul.

It was not credible.

Mustafa turned back into the shade of his pavilion. A long looking-glass leaned against a post, and he stood before it and stared long and deep into his own fathomless black eyes. The distant noise of battle rumbled over the sunblanched hills beyond, men screamed and fought and died. But in the looking-glass he saw only himself.

Nicholas reeled and clutched tight the sword of Brider de la Gordcamp, the crude pontoon bridge on its mix of boats and wooden barrels rolling underneath him. Arrows hissed in the air, shouts came from the Birgu side. They were already cutting the ropes. They could not allow the Turks across to form a bridgehead. The pontoon must be destroyed.

But Henri Parisot leaned on his left, a gaping wound in his neck, and he struggled forward, legs shaking. Behind him the last of the heavily armoured knights, half a dozen of them, still held the bridge against the howling, frustrated hordes. Then the sounds of muskets cracked out at short range, and a heavy splash told him that bullets this near were armour-piercing. He heard the deep roar of Copier behind him.

‘St Elmo’s wages!’ he cried, and there was the sound of a slicing sword, and guttural cries.

The bridge rocked, his eyes were blinded. The pontoon was as slippery as fishskin. And now there were dark-skinned corsairs diving into the water and swimming round the last of the armoured knights to scramble up behind them. They would be trapped. And it was Maddalena he thought of, even now.

‘Get back, lad!’ roared Copier. ‘Or I’ll brain you and drag you back myself!’

More musket fire, more arrows hissing into the water. A corsair arched out of the sea in agony, an arrow from his own side stuck in his back. From the walls of Birgu, knights and townsmen were witnessing in anguish this last desperate act of Senglea’s fall.

Parisot’s grip on Nicholas’s left arm suddenly lightened, and there was a great whooping expulsion of air from his lungs. A blade jagged out of his chest, and then vanished. He collapsed to the roped boards.

Nicholas ducked instinctively and turned as something swished over him, and there was a heavy Turk in baggy red breeches standing before him. Small eyes twinkling, huge bald head shining, his sword dripping with Parisot’s blood. Behind him he could only see Copier still standing, another knight lying at his feet, and a dozen Turks pushing forward. More dived into the water.

Nicholas looked over the Turk’s shoulder and grinned and nodded, and the Turk turned for a startled moment, expecting the heavily armoured knight to be upon him from behind. But it was a feint of the boy’s, and by the time he realised it the boy’s sword blade had run through his ribs. Air rushed from his lungs through the small puckered wound as the boy whipped the blade back again, and the heavy Turk thumped to the deck, blood bubbling on his lips.

Nicholas glanced down at Parisot and he still breathed. But now there was an Egyptian corsair ahead of them, his dark skin half-blue with many tattoos. He crouched low and slicked the dagger from between his white teeth and tossed it back and forth from hand to hand. These two boys would be easy to finish, one lying mortally wounded, the other a thin shrimp with fair plastered hair, struggling even now to lift his wounded friend to his feet once more. Such chivalry. The boy’s knees almost buckled under the weight of it.

The corsair moved in for the snakelike kill, thinking to seize the wounded helpless one and push him forward hard into the other as his shield, sticking the white shrimp in the ribs below the wounded fellow’s arm before cutting his throat and tossing them both over the side. But first for amusement he jumped and came down hard and the pontoon rippled and rolled on its wooden barrels. The boy staggered and leaned, nearly slipping on the wet planking. Then Parisot with his last strength pulled away from Nicholas’s grasp and sank to his knees before the corsair. He was deliberately freeing the boy to fight, though it might mean his own death. Unburdened, Nicholas sprang forward like a cat, the corsair open-mouthed with horror at the sudden agility of this blood-streaked infidel, who seemed to be flying through the air towards him. He heard the whip of his sword blade rather than saw it, and then he was cut open once, twice, a deadly flurry of slashes and then a long clean thrust to the heart.

Nicholas pulled back and whipped the blade once more through the air to clear it of blood. The Egyptian was still standing, looking shocked, as men eerily may who do not realise they are dead yet. Then he fell sideways into the water, and it seemed to Nicholas that dead men made less splash than the living, their bodies already lightened by the flight of their souls.

‘The bridge is going!’ they shouted from the Birgu side.

If Copier went in the water he would drown, heavily armoured as he was. He stepped backwards to Nicholas, the Turks pushing forwards. Copier hauled up Parisot and Nicholas whirled his sword through the air in front of the oncoming enemy. They saw something crazed in his eyes and hesitated. He glanced back and the powerful Copier was hauling Parisot fast, almost carrying him under one arm, his peg-leg clomping. Nicholas hurried after, knowing that if he slipped, the Turks would be on him and he would die. But as soon as a gap opened up, an order to fire came from the Birgu shore and a murderous volley of arquebus hit the nearest Turks without risk to the last fugitives. Amid the volley sounded the deep distinctive crack of Smith’s jezail. Bullets sang, the bridge rippled under the footfall of numerous Turks, the thump of bodies, cries and splashes. And then someone was dragging Nicholas onto the stone creekside. Another volley came, a grenade exploded far behind, the pontoon was cut loose, and sank under the weight of men a fathom deep.