The Great Siege

8

All day Nicholas and Hodge had fought on the walls, watched advance and retreat, shaking at the impact of the guns. Day after day. Their shoulders were bruised deep from the arquebus’s recoil, their eyes stung, their ears thrummed and sang. Nicholas’s elbow still ached, especially at night when he tried to sleep.

Boy slingers were shot from the walls. He helped to bury a ten year old. A woman fell into his arms where she worked, and he never knew what had killed her. He could see no wound. A Spanish soldier was hit in the head and leapt up and ran away down the street like an athlete and then fell to the ground dead.

At evening the guns would fall silent and the attacks fall back. Mustafa had ordered day and night — but it was not possible. The guns must be rested.

Smith said, ‘Even Janizaries must rest.’

The late summer sunsets flared more and more resplendent over the island every night, and dawn was like heaven on fire. People said it was all the dust kicked up by the guns. The setting sun bathed the stricken streets in soft gold. The guns fallen silent, old people and cripples and the wounded emerged from the remnants of their houses in their crumpled dust-caked robes, and women and children coming from work on the walls. In black widows’ gowns, heads covered, they moved like mourners through the fallen streets of their poor beloved city. Some picked up strewn rocks and carried them as if in a dream, to mend their hearts with mortar and stone. Some wept as they walked, and some women walked steadily ahead with tears running down their dusty faces, for their children were all dead, yet never making a sound nor giving way to a sob. Silent tears that seemed to run in mere accompaniment to their solemn labours as they gathered stones and worked on into the night.

They heaved and rolled aside half-sunk cannonballs, they drew out the dead from beneath the piled walls and from collapsed cellars, passing out infants, crossing themselves, working in absolute silence. An infant half crushed, its body half white with dust and half black with dried blood, was passed reverently along the line of workers and finally wrapped in a clean cloth and laid on the ground for a mother to find if she still lived. Or if her soul had gone before, then the soul of her child had gone with her. Yes, said the women, there was the mother, she had died flung over her own infant, see how the wall had collapsed over her and crushed them both. She died in the pathetic hope she might shield her infant with her own body from the damage wreaked by Turkish guns so huge they were pulled by eighty oxen. Now mother and child had died and gone together to the otherworld, said the women. As it should be. No infant should go alone.

The sun was glorious over Sciberras and inland, illumining the great cliffs of the west copper and gold, the sea barred with burning orange and the sky like red banners streaming in the windless evening sky.

Down the street came the boy, limping slightly, helmet under his arm, his fair hair haloed by the sun, and even in their grief and exhaustion the women greeted him, the Inglis hero, and smiled. His armour barely shone beneath so much dust, the street golden in the evening and light, dust motes dancing, women cooking the evening meal, children coming out to play with hoops as if the siege was all a dream and over now.

Nicholas stopped and leaned against a wall and rested his head and smiled. There beneath a small vine was a wooden cradle with an infant in it, perhaps three months old, left by his mother as she washed clothes round the corner in St Mark’s Fountain. The infant looked up through the vine leaves and the warm light twinkled on his face as the leaves moved and stirred, and he laughed and reached out to play with them. He couldn’t reach, so Nicholas broke off a leaf with its stem and put it in his pudgy little hand. The baby clutched it wonderingly, his fingers like tiny pink shrimps, and then gurgled with delight at the green waving flag in his hand, and the coming and going of the setting sun beyond the leaves, and the flickering green forest light over his upturned face.

The boy was overwhelmed at the infant’s joy amid the horror. Two dead bodies lay only ten feet away, but the baby was oblivious. Nicholas dropped his helmet to the ground and closed his eyes and tried to let his mind fill only with this sound, these chortles of infant happiness. Like water from a well, washing it all away.

He pictured the Turks encamped on their hills, putting their guns away, cooking meat on their rings of mail. Cookmasters slicing onions and simmering rice, cauldrons steaming over dung-fires: a domestic scene. The end of another working day.

He opened his eyes.

Up on the heights as the sun went down and the sky darkened, there was other activity than slicing onions and simmering rice, cleaning swords and settling down to tell tales.

A tall lean man with the face of a hawk walked among the greatest of the guns and gave quiet orders without cease, and against the blood-red sky off Gallows Point, gunners set to work once more, silhouettes against the setting sun, re-powdering and tamping and wadding. Even if the guns needed resting and cooling, tonight there would be no rest. On Margherita, two men heaved up hundred pound balls into gaping muzzles, carved like the mouths of dragons and serpents.

Nicholas kept quite still, the baby gurgling by his side. But a fine muscle in his right hand twitched.

It was coming again.

He looked down the street to where the much reinforced curtain wall still towered. It could not be. As Smith said, even the Janizaries must sleep.

On the heights they were lighting the matchstocks and passing among the guns, the sun now just below the rimmed horizon of the sea, the sky fading into night, the last birds but shadows of scimitars against the deep blue dusk.

His hand twitched. He stared down at it. No, please God, no, not more. Not now. They could not take any more. They would surely fall, they could not hold them back again now, and everything they had fought for would be wasted and lost, and everyone slaughtered in the town like cattle. Let it be evening. Let it be peace for a while, dear God.

He moved down the street a little way, towards the walls, setting his helmet back on his head.

The infant chortled and the last light went. He lay in darkness and the leaves stopped twinkling at him. He turned and stared with his huge baby eyes at Nicholas passing him, no longer smiling. Staring, waiting.

Something was coming.

A matchstock was lowered to the powder.

Nicholas cried out and ran back.

A cannon roared and a ball the weight of a man flew through the darkening air.

‘No!’ he cried and hurled himself on the infant.

The ball crashed into the wall and came hurtling through as the boy threw himself on the baby.

The Turks had succeeded in mining the walls after all. It was not the renewed bombardment of the guns that had done it. They were merely announcing that they had conquered.

A hundred-yard section of Birgu’s landwall was ruptured wide open by the terrific blast from the mines. Sections of wall split from top to bottom and collapsed slowly forward in billowing waves of rubble and shattered stone. The great heaped earthen ramparts and sacks of bulking behind were blown high into the sky, solid earth reduced in a second to nothing but vapour and dust. Bodies of the slain fell flailing through the night air and came to land in a sickening, inhuman tangle. Others lay still convulsing and twitching, legs and arms snapped under them.

A wall of dust and hurtling masonry came surging up the street towards Nicholas like a great wave forty feet high, billowing overhead. Nearby houses shuddered, roofs caved in, and more cannon balls hurtled triumphantly in. The Turkish guns lit up the night sky in a monstrous bombardment. Once more the city dragged itself upright to fight. But this time it would surely lose.

The old and the sick were already defeated in their hearts. Further up the street, torn at by the hail and the dust as if by a storm wind, an old woman fell back against a doorway and raised her hands to heaven and tears coursed down her face. Slowly she slid to the ground, weeping and shaking her head and crying, no more, no more, her face crumpled like ancient parchment ruined by time.

Mustafa Pasha raised his arms again and again. The cannons roared, the serpent mouths flared, the balls flew, the ruptured walls shivered and shattered further and bodies tumbled.

Another huge blast and Nicholas crawled free, and then another ball roared into the same place, the Mameluke engineers ensuring that strike after strike hit the same spot on the broken walls, so desperately propped and thinly manned, and blasted into the heart of the city. The wall that Nicholas reeled against began to topple and fold forwards, and then the boy and the infant he was dazedly clutching were buried beneath enough masonry to kill a horse, a sudden white tomb of powder and sandstone dust.

The knights limped and staggered to the massive breach, up onto a ramp of rubble twenty feet high, as the Janizary corps charged down the hill from Santa Margherita. Word went out to the infirmary that the Turks had successfully mined and blown the walls. All able to walk must come at last to fight. Blinded men tapped their way with crutches to the walls, determined to die sword in hand.

The opposing forces clambered up from each side, the breach must somehow be held, and there was La Valette himself, the old man unmistakable. There was a pummelling encounter as the two lines clashed, the rent walls either side of the breach manned by Maltese men and boys, screaming women, black hair flying, stones hurling down. The Janizaries crowded forward in far greater numbers than the defenders, yet were still held back by the line of pitiful rubble and the people, heedless and wild with exhaustion. A last few fire hoops and grenades rained down on the close-packed attackers, a surge of white silks and dark skins, as desperate as the defenders now to be in and finish this.

Then a fresh band of knights came in, heavily armoured, led once more by Marshal Copier. The townspeople parted before them as they pounded up the rampart to take their place and fight alongside La Valette himself.

‘Forward! Forward!’ screamed a voice from the heights. It was Mustafa. But his men could not do it. Once more, of the thousand who went into the attack, a third were already killed or wounded beyond fighting. Mustafa held his scimitar aloft as if to slay any who returned, but they would have to fall back in bitterness and shame. They would flee as so many times before, the Maltese running after them in the dark and sinking hatchets into their backs, backs arching, crying out, gross insults hurled over the strewn dead. The rubble mounds slathered black in the night, blood-rusted sandstone when the dawn sun rose.

Then a terrible cry went up that La Valette was hit. The battle-line wavered, Copier himself stopped to help the tottering Master, and was hit in his turn by an arrow to the thigh. The Janizaries sensed that victory was within their grasp and pushed forward with one last mighty heave, maces and swords and axes cutting destruction through the thinned, despairing defenders. Maltese and knights and the last few Spanish soldiers fell back and tumbled down the breach in disarray, Bektaşi howled, Janizaries pushed on, keeping formation. Finally their numbers told.

They were in.

From out of the heart of a tomb of white dust and sandstone in the street behind erupted a plaster-coloured hand. It flattened against the wall, held there. Stones were pulled way and a fallen soldier crawled out dazed, an infant clutched to his chest. The infant was wide-eyed and covered in dust like a homunculus made of all flour, but unhurt except for a small cut on his head, blood seeping through his fine baby hair and turning the white dust red.

But he did not cry. He stared around in his infant amazement at the infinite strangeness of a world that could change so quickly from the sunlight coming dancing through vine leaves to play with him, to burial alive beneath the ruined stones of war. The boy raised him up and wept openly, risen like Lazarus from that abrupt tomb. The boy was bruised and cut about, but his morion was still on his head, or the falling masonry would have killed him.

The boy’s prayers of thanks were as fervent as any in his whole sixteen years, or maybe seventeen. His birthday used to be in August. As if it mattered. He knelt in the ruins of the street and bowed his head and prayed over the infant.

A woman came round the corner, still dazedly clutching her washing linens, silently staring at the mound of rubble where her infant had previously lain in his simple cradle that her husband made from olive wood last winter. Then on her left hand a dust-covered knight or soldier was standing beside her, speaking to her. She heard nothing. There in his arms was her boy, her bambino, her first-born son, dusted all in flour and with a tiny red cut on his head. She heard nothing of the soldier’s words nor anyone else’s, nor even the shouts and screams from behind that the Turks had broken into the town. There was nothing but her son. She took him from the knight’s arms, and the infant looked up at her, wide-eyed with amazement still. She bent down, her headdress falling over him, and she kissed the tiny wound on his head. Then she spat on a corner of her headdress and with infinite tenderness wiped away the little blood. The infant never cried, only gazed up at her, and the knight stared too. Never a word was spoken, but he saw the woman and her child like Mary and the Christ child wounded, and Mary herself kissing and salving his wounds with her kisses.

‘Get back in your house!’ cried Nicholas, coming out of the dream.

She gestured at the mound of rubble and smiled a strange smile.

They were fighting furiously just at the end of the street yet she seemed oblivious.

‘Any house!’ He shoved her into a darkened doorway. ‘The cellar!’

La Valette refused assistance, and demanded that his wounded leg was bound up so he could continue fighting. Copier knelt and tore off his neckcloth and tied him as best he could.

‘We must fall back to San Angelo, Sire!’ cried another knight nearby. ‘Take up the drawbridge, we may still hold out.’

‘And abandon the town to its fate?’ said La Valette savagely. ‘This town of heroes?’

The knight looked ashamed.

‘It is too late anyway. As I joined you here, I gave orders for all the precious icons of the Order to be carried from St Lawrence into San Angelo, the fort to be evacuated, and the drawbridge destroyed. Here is where we take our stand.’ He stabbed the ground with his sword point. ‘Here is where we die, if we must! With our people!’

The invading Turks soon found themselves lost and divided amid a dense labyrinth of narrow, dark-shaded streets and mean, tight-packed alleyways. The undisciplined Bektaşi, their hearts already set on rape and enrichment, dissolved into a mere horde of frenzied individuals, dashing into houses to find the women and steal the gold. One or two managed to satisfy themselves in the murderous panic, but one found that his woman cut her own throat even as he stripped her naked, and more than one felt himself stabbed to death in the side even as he copulated with his kicking victim. Most other maddened Bektaşi, however, were trapped in small rooms of houses and brained with chamber pots in doorways, tripped up in nets, cut down with knives, run through with pitchforks or garrotted with ropes. Having broken into the city, they believed it was finished, and victory was theirs. They learnt differently.

The Janizaries kept order, better acquainted with the savageries of house-to-house fighting, but they found themselves trapped again and again in cul-de-sacs, behind hastily erected but effective barricades of mere furniture, chairs and tables and bales of bedding. More than a hundred charged into the little square of St Mark, only to find that there was no exit, and quickly blocking their retreat was a line of a dozen or more knights, grim and silent in their battered plate. The Janizaries surged against them but could not break out again, and from above, from the first floor windows and balconies and flat roofs of the surrounding houses, missiles began to rain down upon them. Plates smote bare heads, rocks and stones shattered shoulder bones, and they sank down stunned, grovelling on their knees. They had captured the city, surely. The green banner of Islam and the golden orb of Suleiman now stood on the walls of Birgu above the ruined post of Provence. And yet still they were being slaughtered like dazed cattle, as the shadow of armoured knights fell across them.

La Valette’s ruthless preparations had followed every rule of defence in depth. The invaders found themselves faced with one exhausting, attritional barrier after another. Every street, every wretched back alley, was a new battleground. It was a wearying and dispiriting labour. One house after another must be captured, one barricade after another stormed, and again and again they were trapped in small bands, isolated and destroyed.

At times fresh explosions went off behind them as they surged forward through the town, and they were not explosions caused by their own guns, which had fallen silent now. They were charges laid in preparation by the defenders. Houses were carefully blown to collapse behind them as they advanced, another would be blown ahead of them, and yet again they were caught, unable to escape. Yet again missiles rained down from above.

Often at the end of the streets, they glimpsed a tall, ancient figure striding past, grim-visaged with his clipped white beard beneath his high scarlet-plumed helmet, unmistakable yet seeking no cover. Quite the opposite: determined to be seen everywhere. His only protection was his armour and his great shield, emblazoned with the cross and a falcon. His left thigh was bound with a bloody bandage, yet he walked without the faintest limp and directed all operations with a steady energy and tranquillity. That was the Frankish warrior, their Pasha, called La Valette. He had about him an aura changeless and terrifying.

Nicholas and Stanley had chased two Janizaries into a cul-de-sac, and the two warriors now turned like noble beasts at bay and faced them. Four swords and scimitars thrust accusingly towards each other, all four of them panting, exhausted, uncertain. There came shouts and footfalls behind them, a furious exchange of clanking blows of steel on shield. Nicholas fixed his opponent in the eye. The Janizary had blue eyes, fair skin. He had been a Christian until he was seven. Nicholas’s sword point wavered with tiredness and doubt. And then a look crossed the Janizary’s face. Nicholas glanced back and saw two more of the enemy running towards them. Two tall, straight-backed Sipahis with their long cavalry swords, still fresh-looking and alert.

‘Stanley!’

A veteran fighter, Stanley knew from the boy’s tone of voice that danger was coming, he didn’t need to look. He sliced his sword warningly through the air before him and at the same time seized the boy in his left arm and dragged him back into a doorway just wide enough for the two of them, backed up tight, blades before them. The knight heaved but the damnable door was firmly bolted inside.

‘Open up!’ he roared.

The terrified family inside remained frozen.

The four enemy soldiers formed a semi-circle around them. This burly blond giant would not be easy. If only they still had guns, it would be like shooting rats in a ditch.

A distant horn sounded, a single long wailing note that sounded like mourning. The four Turks looked at each other. They still did not step in for the kill. Nicholas doubted that his right arm could mete out another convincing blow. His arm muscles burned, his sword point wavered and drooped before him.

‘Weapon up, boy!’ shouted Stanley.

But there was something about the soldiers’ stance that told Nicholas they were not going to close in for the kill. Something had happened.

The horn sounded again afar off. A long lone call, falling away.

Everything was very still. Then the four lethal blades hemming them in, ready to run them through, were let drop. The blue-eyed Janizary shot his broad-bladed scimitar back in its sheath, his jaw clenched but his expression of sad resignation. Then he took one step back, out of range of Stanley’s sword, and gave a small, unmistakable bow.

The horn sounded a third time, and then he and his three comrades were striding away back to the breach in the walls, heads lowered, silk robes billowing.

All over the town, the defenders stopped and peered through the dust and the black powder smoke and saw that there were few more Turks left to kill. They patrolled carefully through the streets and cut down those few they could find. It was eerily silent. A cry here, a groan there, the last few Turks being despatched by womenfolk with their knives. A Bektaşi who had tried to rape a girl in an alley was punished appropriately by the girl and her mother, and left in the street to bleed to death.

The little square of St Mark with its precious freshwater fountain was awash with blood and the corpses of a hundred Janizaries. Knights lay slain also. But more still patrolled the streets, or returned to the remains of the walls, barely breathing or daring to hope. The attack had died off.

All who entered had been killed or laid low. And instead of the entire Turkish army pressing forward after them, as it could easily have done … no more came.

Nicholas and Stanley found Smith among a group standing with the Grand Master at the head of the street, looking down to the rent in the walls.

‘Master,’ gasped Copier, almost collapsed forward on the weight of his own sword, visibly bending under him. ‘What now?’

‘Sheathe your sword, man,’ said La Valette. ‘It isn’t a walking stick.’

Very slowly, Copier cranked himself upright again, blood leaking from a dozen wounds. With enormous effort he lifted his sword, his muscles so tired that the blade trembled violently. Nicholas stepped forward and helped him and he managed to set the point into the mouth of his scabbard and thrust it home and then took a deep breath.

By heaven, the Grand Master was a tyrant worse than Nero. But he was magnificent.

‘Now, Marshal,’ said La Valette, ‘you ask what has happened. Can you climb with me to the walls?’

‘What’s left of them.’

‘What’s left of them.’ La Valette nodded. ‘Or can you lean on the boy?’

‘The boy will collapse. Won’t you, boy?’

‘I …’ stammered Nicholas, struck like all the others there with a fatigue like death. ‘I … I’m not sure-’

‘Allow me, Marshal,’ said Smith, so slathered in blood that barely a gleam of armour showed. ‘Lean on me. I have looked from the walls already. It is a fine sight.’

‘Who has come?’ said Stanley. ‘Smith? How do you know?’

‘Counsel is mine, and sound wisdom,’ said Smith unhelpfully.

‘The relief?’ said Copier. He looked around with wild hope. ‘Spain has come?’

‘Not Spain,’ said La Valette. ‘Come and see.’

They leaned on what remained of the walls beside the shattered post of Auvergne. The neighbouring post of Provence, walls and bastion both, were virtually flattened. The Turks could have marched in two hundred abreast. But as La Valette knew, though had passed on to none, everything was against them. Their numbers, once forty thousand strong, were less than twenty, perhaps fifteen. Before Elmo and then Birgu, half of them had died. Another five thousand or more were sick of dysentery and camp fever, sick unto death. He had smelled the foul taint of it on the air across the harbour, two weeks ago now, and seen them burning blankets in desperation. Birgu, meanwhile, had been kept free of any outbreak of crippling disease by the most stringest rules governing wells and fountains, hygiene and sewage. The moment any well or fountain was ruptured by cannonball, it was declared unsafe to use and blocked off. The people had to work harder, walk further each day for their water. But no disease had come on them. And La Valette knew of old that it was plague and pestilence that killed, more than any war.

The Ottoman food and powder supplies were almost gone too. He had noticed days ago that the guns were firing less often. They could no longer afford it. Despite that vast armada that had sailed down the Bosphorus four long months ago, carrying an unimaginable tonnage of provisions and military materials, it was close to exhausted. They might have hoped to be resupplied from North Africa by Dragut. But Dragut was dead. And another mighty supply ship, desperately needed, had been sunk by the blessed Chevalier Romegas, wolf of the Inland Sea.

The Grand Master and his Marshal and knights looked out across the stricken tableland. The main camp of the Ottomans at the head of Marsa was ablaze. Hugely ablaze.

‘Who-’ muttered Copier.

‘Malta,’ said La Valette, ‘Malta herself has saved us.’