The Great Siege

7

Nicholas came in under the steep shadow of Birgu’s cracked western walls after Copier and Parisot, the youth unbelievably carried slung over the Marshal’s shoulder. Then Nicholas was half pulled up a ladder. A soldier took the sword from his tight fist firmly and encouraged him in over the parapet. A fair-haired sunburnt giant was clapping him on the shoulder and saying in a voice he knew well, with inimitable humour, ‘Late again, Master Ingoldsby. Why so tardy?’

He grinned and reeled and nearly fainted, and Stanley held him upright.

‘And why so weary? Anyone would think you had just run a mile, lad.’

‘Give him some water,’ growled Smith, busily cleaning the blackened barrel of his jezail. ‘He’s done more good works than you today, you fat tallow-haired lummox.’

When he had wet his throat and could speak again, Nicholas asked weakly, ‘How’s it been with Birgu?’

Smith said, ‘Busy.’

They moved at a crouch along the parapet to the post of Provence, and the stench that arose from the ditches below the riven walls was the stench of Elmo. Janizaries, Bektaşis, Sipahis, Berbers and corsairs lay in indistinguishable heaps.

‘We held the walls,’ said Stanley, ‘while the townsmen mounted charge after charge into the breeches in support. They fought with long-handled billhooks, scythes, fishing spears bound to wooden poles with wet rope, which serve to gut a man as well as a fish. It is good to fight with them.’

‘And the women are all turned builders,’ said Smith. ‘The girls, the grandmothers. All of them.’

Though the walls of Birgu still stood, to the Turks’ frustration, the effect of the bombardment took its toll in other ways. The guns raged on and on and never stopped. Every man and woman in the city must hold their nerve. The endless battering explosions frayed the soul. Already the weaker-minded had begun to gibber and go mad, to grip tables and walls, to walk slowly, eyes staring, or hold their hands to their ears and beg it to stop. They began to cry and say that they must get away, they must escape. Some took to the rooftops and gazed up into the sky and prayed to God to take them. And often they were killed there, standing stark and terrified under the cannon-torn sky.

An hour later they were under attack again. A troop of boys came up onto the blasted parapet, and scrambled out onto perilous crumbling heights and fought too. They cried ‘Vittoria!’ in high piping voices as they fought with their only weapons, which were birding slings. For the people of Malta were passionate bird-hunters, so much so that few birds survived on the island. The knights martialled the boys carefully and had them loose their stones in a flanking hail at the Janizary onrush as they tried once more to come in over the rugged rampart of the breech.

The Janizaries glanced up and one yelled out, ‘We are under attack from boys!’ As if not knowing whether to be amused or indignant. Yet the rounded stones hurtling forth from those whirring leather straps were no toys. Flying stones struck exposed throats and temples, shattered wrist bones, hands and knee caps, and David slew Goliath once more as he did in the Valley of Elah in ancient times.

Perhaps eight hundred Janizaries had been killed at the land walls, and astonishingly, not one had broken into the town. But the losses of the defenders had been grievous, far worse in proportion, and the little victories of St Michel and the waterfront battery were small comfort.

In the evening, La Valette heard the roll of the dead from Sir Oliver Starkey.

‘The Chevaliers Federico Sangrigorio; Giovanni Malespina; Raffaele Salvago …’ The list went on and on.

At one point La Valette interrupted, ‘Do you have news of the English boy? The Ingoldsby boy?’

Starkey scanned the list for his countryman. ‘No, Sire. He is still with us. I know he fought at Senglea-’

‘Did he?’ La Valette clenched his mouth.

‘He came back almost last, with the Marshal Copier himself, moments before they blew the bridge.’

La Valette’s eyes gleamed. ‘Continue.’

‘Javier, the nephew of Don Pedro Mezquita.’

‘What age was he?’

‘Eighteen. Don Pedro was wounded trying to save him. Slain Janizaries lay around the boy like mown flowers.’

La Valette buried his face in his hands for a moment and then looked up again. Starkey had never seen him look so tired. How much longer could a man of his years go on, barely sleeping, barely eating, grief-stricken to the heart but refusing to weep? Starkey wished he could take some of the burden from him. But La Valette would not share it. The grief and the burden would lie on his old shoulders until the end.

‘The young always die soonest,’ said La Valette softly. ‘With their brave, reckless hearts. And?’

‘Don Federique de Toledo.’

‘Slain?’

‘Yes, Sire. A grenade misfired, he lost his hand, and still he fought on until he collapsed from loss of blood. The medics could not save him.’

‘Age?’

‘Also eighteen.’

The son of Don García de Toledo, Viceroy of Sicily. How would that help or hinder the relief plans? It was a sad loss. They were all sad losses.

Names piled on names. Starkey’s voice grew more and more strained. At last he hesitated. He could not finish.

After a time, La Valette said quietly, ‘My nephew is dead. Henri Parisot is dead.’ He nodded almost imperceptibly. ‘Also eighteen.’

‘Sire-’

‘They have only gone along the road we all must follow soon. And every knight is equally dear to my heart as if he were my son. The loss of Javier de Mezquita moves me no less than the loss of my beloved nephew.’ His voice was very even and calm. Starkey could not bear to look at him. More quietly still, he said, ‘A little while, and we shall not see them. And then a little while, and we shall see them.’

His grace and greatness as a leader, his natural authority, his sad nobility, were never more evident to his secretary than then.

He stood and turned his back on Starkey and went over to the window and looked out across the harbour. Dying sunlight bright on half-drowned coloured banners and sundered timbers, flags of gold damask, corpses lining the shore, shields washed new and cleansed.

‘Leave me now,’ he said.

As he bowed out, Starkey saw that the Grand Master’s shoulders were shaking.

Under cover of moonless nights, the women crept out through small postern gates and culverts in the walls, veils over their faces, as much to shield themselves from the foul stench of the dead than out of modesty. The men kept watch from the walls, in case of further attack, while their womenfolk went among the enemy fallen with knives, cutting the throats of any they found still moving. They killed them, they said, for the sake of Christ and their children.

Stanley watched over them. Of all battles fought, this was the most merciless. Yet he could not doubt that at the last, when the Turks captured the town, in their vengeful fury they would kill and crucify every living thing within. He foresaw scenes of women cut in two, boy slingers nailed to parodic crosses all along the walls.

No, this was not a battle that left room for mercy. He cradled his gun and waited.

Two hours or more into the night, he woke Nicholas with a whisper, shaking his shoulder. ‘I need your eyes, boy. Out there, just this side of that sand ridge, see? I thought I saw a spear.’

‘What do you mean?’ he mumbled, still rubbing sleep away.

‘Just watch.’

Nicholas stared another minute, and then to his amazement saw what Stanley had seen. A spearhead, bright in the moonlight, suddenly appeared eerily out of the ground itself, and then vanished.

He stared at the knight, not understanding.

‘Miners,’ said Stanley. ‘Testing their progress. But they have given themselves away, still twenty yards out from the walls.’ He squared his shoulders. ‘Time for the counter-attack, I think.’

The Turks had found mining through the solid rock of the island a terrible labour, and the defenders did not attempt counter-mines. Instead Smith and Stanley led a small, swift party out through a small postern gate to the place where the telltale spear had been glimpsed, and with ferocious rapidity, simply gouged their way down through the earth into the tunnel from above. They dropped down into it and penetrated some way along, until they were surprised by a group of miners.

What an infernal skirmish was fought underground then. In that perpetual subterranean darkness, the Turkish and Egyptian miners fought back with picks and shovels by dim torchlight, choking on fetid air and dust. Eventually they were beaten back far enough for the knights to stack ample explosives about the pit props, set light to the fuses and flee. Moments later, a hundred yards or more of painstakingly built tunnels were detonated to ruins, and many miners buried alive.

Back on the walls, a panting Smith and Stanley grinned when they saw the telltale subsidence in the ground beyond, and clapped each other on the back.

Mustafa heard this latest news in utter silence. He did not even give orders for further tunnels to be built.

The night before, his personal valet had died of camp fever. The night before that, his cook had also died. But they were only servants. The worse news was that a massive resupply ship from Stamboul, carrying much-needed powder, food and medicines, had been sunk by a Christian galley. The galley flew the flag of the Knights Hospitaller, and its hull was painted blood-red.

It was the galley of the Chevalier Romegas.

News came to La Valette that the harbour of Marsamuscetto had been blockaded with tethered logs. To stop the Sicilian and Spanish relief from coming in?

‘Or perhaps,’ said Starkey hopefully, ‘to stop the Turkish galleys deserting? Which would show we are indeed winning, would it not?’

‘Of course we are winning,’ said La Valette. ‘We have been winning for four months. Another month of winning like this, and we’ll be done for.’

Again the Grand Master’s harsh joke spread through the town as fast as a whipped dog. They smiled grimly and fought on.

Tales and rumours had begun to spread out over the wider world also. At last the epic nature and importance of the Siege of Malta began to dawn upon Christian Europe. The French court stirred guiltily, the German princes uneasily, Philip II continued meditating his private plans, though sharing them with none. The merchants of Genoa and Venice looked to their great galleys and counted their guns and wondered. Even Protestant England said prayers for Catholic Malta. Her cold Virgin Queen demanded intelligence from her exceptional network of informers, questioning her spies with sharp, crisp interrogation, in the six different languages she spoke fluently.

Where would the armies of Islam strike next, if Malta should fall? France and Spain, her greatest enemies. No harm in that. Yet what if the Turk should conquer them, and all their possessions besides? The Lowlands of Holland resound with the cry of the muezzin? What if the divided German princes fell one by one, what if Rome was sacked once more, and Genoa and Venice and the Adriatic bowed the knee to Suleiman? Then England might stand alone, a solitary island in the silver sea, the warriors of the Prophet like a pack of slavering hounds upon the French coast, reaching across, straining at their leash, eyes hungrily fastened on the green fields and woods of her beloved kingdom.

Pope Pius IV, who had shown little resolve in the face of threatened catastrophe, led prayers in St Peter’s, saying, ‘Almighty Father, we realise in what great peril Sicily and Italy will be, what great calamities threaten all Christian people if the island of Malta should fall …’

He announced that he would remain in Rome rather than flee, if the Turk should come. But many wondered, was Judgement upon the world?

The politics and prayers were not heard on Malta, exhausted and decimated and deafened by the Turkish guns. None could run the blockades any more. Turkish galleys ringed the island, cannon ringed the last tottering, dust-caked streets of Birgu. Whether or not the Holy Father or the Queen of England was praying for them now, they knew nothing of it. It hardly mattered.

It was August. Perhaps the Feast Day of St Lawrence, the 10th of August, perhaps later. Days had lost their names. There had been no festivities to mark the patron of the Conventual Church. There were no priests left alive. The young priest who had laughed on hearing Nicholas’s confession — Nicholas passed him in the street. He lay under a shroud of dust, his black hair now plaster-white, a thin trickle of blood dried at the corner of his mouth, his young face serene.

Maddalena went through the streets with a pitcher of well-watered wine and a fresh loaf, and found Nicholas on the south walls. He hurried her down to shelter again.

‘I have brought you these,’ she said.

He took them. ‘I am grateful for it. But you must return home, it is safer there.’

‘Why should I be kept safe? You are not. Many are not.’

He looked exasperated.

She shielded her eyes and looked up at the toothed walls. ‘Will they stand? Will we live?’

‘Yes. I think so. But pray for it.’

Suddenly she raised her arms above her head, stretching, showing off her slim figure, and pirouetted, there in the ruined street. She said with a smile, ‘In November it is St Catherine’s Day.’

Girls’ minds were so strange. ‘Your point eludes me.’

‘It is Maltese custom that on the feast of St Catherine of Alexandria, a girl can ask a boy to marry her.’

‘In my country that’s on the 29th of February. Only once every four years. A safer arrangement.’

‘Well, you are in Malta now.’

‘I know that. The cannonballs keep reminding me.’

She looked serious again. ‘It will be over soon.’

He nodded. ‘One way or another. You should go home.’

She hesitated and then at last she said shyly, ‘I think of you … all the time.’

‘I think of you likewise,’ he said softly. ‘Which is why I want you to go home.’

She turned and went. A little way up the street she looked back, but he was climbing up on to the walls again and did not mark her. Only when he reached the parapet did he look back, but she was gone.