The Last Crusaders: Blood Red Sea (19 page)

Romegas eyed the little swinging lantern of the fishing boat a mile off. ‘Now begins the business of distinguishing friend from foe. This will be the story of your Cyprus campaign.’

Romegas said his farewells to them and embraced his brother knights heartily, the tears in his eyes betraying his fear that he would ever see them alive again. Gil de Andrada too would stay aboard, far more value as a naval captain than a land soldier. They would return to Malta.

‘God give you the victory,’ said Romegas, clasping Stanley about his broad chest. ‘I wish to God that I was with you, but I am a seaman, and it is at sea I do my best work.’

‘We know it,’ said Stanley, ‘and the Turk knows it too.’

‘Sail away fast with our blessing,’ said Smith. ‘Cyprus is a lone Christian outpost in a Turkish sea, surrounded by the enemy. Flying the cross of St John of Malta, this galley is like a straw man on an archery green.’

‘The
St John
is no straw man,’ said Romegas.

‘And you’ll prove it yet, I have no doubt.’

‘Fortune go with you, Brother,’ said Giustiniani gravely. The two old veterans had fought side by side for forty years or more. ‘And may you hear good news of Don John and the Holy League. We need it.’

‘There
is
no Holy League,’ said Romegas with sudden bitterness. ‘It is a figment of the Pope’s.’

‘A noble lie,’ said Giustiniani. ‘A noble dream. Wait and pray.’

Smith, Stanley and Luigi Mazzinghi went out in the longboat with barely a sound, and moved towards the fishing boat, their swords under their cloaks so as not to catch the moonlight. But the sharp-eyed fisherman had already seen them and the lantern went out. Yet his boat did not move. They rowed towards him.

Finally they pulled back on the oars only a few yards short. They could see the shadowy outline of a man, sturdy looking, holding his boathook like a pike.

‘Ho there,’ whispered Stanley. ‘Your name.’

‘What do you want with me?’

‘Nothing of you, friend, but your name.’

After a long pause, the fisherman said, ‘My name is Nikos. The Turks are on the coast all around. And your galley there is nicely lit up by the moon.’

‘We thought to have sailed round to Famagusta. But we cannot.’

Nikos shook his head. ‘The Turks already have Lemessos and Larnaca. The seas all around Cyprus belong to them now. You would not get round in your galley unseen, they would destroy you in the water, and it is too far in that longboat.’

‘Then will you guide us ashore here?’

‘How much?’

‘We come to fight for your island, man.’

‘How much?’ said Nikos stubbornly.

Stanley sighed. ‘A ducat.’

‘Done.’

They moved as fast as they could in silence. Mazzinghi, Smith and Stanley remained in the longboat while swords and muskets were lowered down in wrapped blankets, and Giustiniani climbed down to join them. Then two Sicilian mariners, who would row the longboat back to the
St John
. Then Smith stood up again, setting the longboat rocking dangerously. Stanley told him to sit, for the love of God, but Smith ignored him and climbed back up the ladder. At the rail he spoke quickly to Romegas, who then lowered one of the small standards of the Maltese Cross from outside the stern cabin and handed it to the Englishman. Smith sat back in the longboat and rolled up the standard on his knee.

‘An excellent idea, Fra John,’ said Stanley. ‘Ensuring that if we are captured by the Turks, as is more than likely, they will search your knapsack and discover that we are Knights of St John, going in disguise in Turkish territory. And what do you think they will do to us then? More than tickle us in the ribs, I imagine.’

Smith ignored him, carefully stowed the tightly rolled standard at the bottom of his sack, and then sat back looking almost pleased.

Stanley sighed. ‘It’s like trying to reason with a small child.’

Mazzinghi grinned in the darkness, as nervous and excited as any of them.

Finally Nicholas and Hodge came down the ladder, and one other with them.

‘Why is he coming?’ hissed Stanley.

‘Just a hunch,’ said Smith. ‘Don’t you have hunches?’

‘Yes. And they’re usually wrong. A Moor. Brilliant. Seven of us going to liberate Cyprus from the Mohammedans, and one of us is a Moor.’

‘Seven against Thebes,’ said Nicholas. ‘The Seven Sages.’

Stanley laughed sardonically.

‘What happened to the Scetti fellow?’ asked Smith.

‘I sold him back to Romegas,’ said Nicholas. ‘Twenty ducats.’

‘A poor price,’ said Abdul.

‘You keep silent,’ said Smith. ‘You may be a free man, God help us, but no Moor speaks aboard
my
boat.’

‘Enough talk,’ said Giustiniani, and flung his arm out.

‘Off we go,’ said Stanley, slowly moving his oar. ‘Why, I can feel that army of a hundred thousand Turks trembling at our very approach.’

Nikos guided them into a small, shallow cove, hidden by tall cliffs.

‘We’re trapped already,’ said Smith, glancing round, as if half expecting Turkish musketeers to appear above, forewarned by some secret signal from Nikos, to slaughter them where they sat.

‘You can hardly step ashore on a broad beach,’ said Nikos, ‘not in this moonlight. But look, there is a gully in the cliffs. That is your route.’

‘You are coming with us.’

‘I am not. It is enough for me.’

Mazzinghi was already wading through the shallows with the bundles of weapons.

Stanley squinted up at the cliffs. Even he was feeling daunted at the absurd task they had set themselves. ‘And then we make inland, and across the Troödos mountains. I think it will take us ten days.’

Nikos stroked his moustache. ‘You would be strong for that. More like twenty. The Troödos are no mere hills, and then the burning plain beyond – it is May now, and very hot.’

‘We can come down to Kyrenia from inland, or else to Nicosia.’

Nikos eyed them. He was an old man, his eyelids drooping like his moustache, his eyes like those of an old dog that has seen all. He spoke without pity for them, and without enmity, but with sorrow for his native island. ‘The Turks have already taken Kyrenia.’

All heads turned. ‘Impossible! Not so quickly as that, not with those fortifications.’

‘Not by conquest,’ said Nikos. ‘Kyrenia surrendered without a shot. They saw the size of the Turkish armada, and they held up
their hands. It was a wise decision for men who want to live.’

‘Without honour, despised by all,’ said Smith.

Nikos inclined his head and made no comment. Instead he said, ‘Now Nicosia is already under siege.’

The words sank in, a bitter double blow. They were come too late, always too few and too late. Smith hung his shaggy head. It was worse, far worse, than he had expected.

‘Brace up,’ said Stanley to all of them, but mostly to his old comrade. ‘We will not sit here and watch Cyprus go up in flames.’

‘Yet what good are we now,’ said young Mazzinghi, wide eyed, ‘so few as we are?’

‘We know a thing or two about sieges,’ said Giustiniani, ‘and experience counts more than numbers. We make for Nicosia. We can do some good, if Governor Dandolo will listen to us.’

‘If,’ said Smith, ‘is a very big word.’

Giustiniani also knew that there was nothing so demoralising for men dismayed as mere talk. Whereas labour worked wonders.

He dropped over the side of the longboat into the warm water with agility, for all his sixty years, took up a bundle, and rapped out orders to the rest of them to follow. Once men got going, their spirits rose accordingly.

They knelt on the narrow beach and divided the muskets and swords, gunpowder and balls between them, as well as their food rations of dried meat, hard cheese and ship’s biscuit. The rest would have to come from forage. Stanley and Mazzinghi both carried crossbows for hunting. Most precious of all were the water flasks.

‘Every time we find fresh water,’ said Giustiniani, ‘you drain your flask, you drink until you can drink no more, then you fill your flask again and walk on.’ He turned to Nikos the fisherman.

‘Very well,’ said Nikos. ‘You ascend that gully. It is steep and crumbling but not impossible. You will come out on to a flat clifftop, a hundred or so paces of bare rock, and then scrub will hide you. Far ahead, right of the Pole Star, you will see a hill with a church dome on top, the village of Agios Nikolaos. Do not go into the village, or only in secret at nightfall. Many there would sell you to the Turk.’

‘Shame on them,’ said Smith.

‘They are hungry,’ said Nikos. ‘Their children starve. Some cousins of mine live there also. So do them no harm in the night, steal not even a loaf, or you will pay for it.’

There was an awkward silence. They had to admire the grim old Greek. Unarmed, surrounded by a group of heavily armed strangers, he was still threatening them.

‘We will circumnavigate this fearsome village,’ said Giustiniani.

Nikos nodded. ‘Beyond the village is forest, and a deep gorge carved by an ancient river. Follow the gorge up, it is good cover, but remember that it is also sweet water from the mountains, and Turks may come there to fill their flasks. A day’s hard climbing, over rocks, over boulders, the gorge still flowing with snowmelt, a night’s sleep, and you will come out on to the dry plateau. Ahead of you then will be the Troödos, the mist of morning upon them.

‘After that, I do not know. It is not my country. But that hard sun-baked plateau is a dry country, the people have fled, and may have poisoned what wells remain for the Turk.’

The gully was as steep and crumbling as Nikos had said, and dark too. They moved slowly and carefully, finely balanced, each foothold tested before they committed their weight, leaving plenty of space between them in case of rockfalls. Several fist-sized chunks of sandstone were torn loose and rolled down the gully to land with a crack on the rocks below. But none of them was struck, at least.

At the top they crouched low and took in their surroundings. All were in a muck sweat already, thinking of water. Out to sea, gilded with the rising sun now and magnificent with her white sails and fluttering banners, the
St John
was moving westwards. Returning to Malta and the sea battle to come.

They were alone.

‘Into the thorn scrub,’ said Giustiniani, ‘and quick about it.’

As they ran, Nicholas’s sharp eyes saw a movement away to his left. He stopped and shielded his eyes and made out a peasant in a loose turban, naked to the waist, gathering salt in a leather bucket from a dried-out rockpool. The peasant stopped too and looked over at this strange apparition of men come from the sea. More Turks, were they?

‘Keep moving, boy,’ said Stanley, trotting past. ‘Ignore him.’

By the time Nicholas got to the cover of the thorn scrub and looked back again, the salt collector had gone.

They took swigs of water from their flasks, gasping. Mazzinghi began to chatter with elation.

‘Silence,’ said Giustiniani harshly. He raised his hand.

They kept still. There was nothing but the silent land, the sun rising in a burning blue sky, the skitter of little lizards. The distant murmur of the sea.

And then Smith too heard something. He cupped his ear with one hand, and laid the other flat on the ground.

Time passed, sweat trickled down. Their legs ached where they squatted. A fly found them and tormented them, then another. Another skitter came from beneath a nearby clump of low thorn. Too big for a lizard. A snake?

Smith looked at Stanley and then Giustiniani. ‘A marching column. Men only, I think, no pack animals.’

‘And pray, no hunting dogs or we are dead men already. Stanley, leave your bundle and go on. Report back soon.’

An agony of waiting. More flies. Nicholas began to feel dizzy and shook his head. The damned Nikos had sold them to the Turk already. The bare bleached rock between the scrub was blinding. He closed his eyes and rocked on his haunches.

Stanley came back some minutes later, silent as a deer. His eyes shone with that mad humour of his.

‘Brothers and gentlemen volunteers,’ he said. ‘We have come ashore right next to a fair company of Turkish infantry, come here, I think’ – he indicated around – ‘to build a lookout station on the coast, against enemy invasion.’

‘Darkness and devils,’ muttered Giustiniani.

‘And,’ said Stanley, rapidly taking up his bundle and hitching it over his shoulder, ‘they have hunting hounds.’

At that very moment, there came an excitable bark from not far off – the unmistakable bark of a hound that has found fresh traces.

‘Run!’ cried Giustiniani.

It was farcical, humiliating, but not one of them was unafraid. If the Turks caught them, their deaths would be prolonged. They
went back down the gully they had just ascended in an undignified scramble, skidding and sliding, sending loose scree slithering and dust cascading. Abdul made sure he went down first, on his bottom. Smith and Stanley knelt at the top of the gully as a rearguard, though what they could do against a column of infantrymen was unclear.

The barking sounded nearer: two of them. Two lean hunting hounds straining at the leash, tongues out, tails wagging. Their handler becoming curious as to what this fresh scent might be. The entire Turkish army on the lookout for any invasion force.

Hodge and Nicholas were down, and Mazzinghi, and now Giustiniani was descending, rapidly and without fuss, face to the cliff.

Smith reached into his bundle for his jezail. Stanley laid his hand on his comrade’s.

‘No, Brother. It is madness.’

‘I’ll die fighting.’

‘No doubt. But not yet.’

The barking was barely a hundred yards off, more and more excited, and they could see low thorn trees stirring as someone passed beneath them. Smith and Stanley dropped to their bellies, pressed themselves into the ground like snakes, their dark canvas bundles cradled on the far side of them, covered in white dust.

The handler called out in Turkish to his comrades. Telling them to come to him armed. Something was up. Now he was at the spot where they had crouched, the hounds snuffing up their very drops of sweat.