The Last Crusaders: Blood Red Sea (29 page)

They came out of the wood again and across a dry burnt plain, then a stubble field burned black. Greek peasants had destroyed all they had, even their own fields of wheat, before the oncoming Turks. They would rather starve than feed the enemy, now they
had heard of the agony of Nicosia, the treachery and the despair, and most of all the sacking of the churches, the desecration of the holy icons. Gradually the atrocities of the invader were doing what such atrocities always do: they were hardening the people against them.

At last the drumbeat of pursuing hooves seemed to fall back. They dared to look round – the dust cloud was far behind.

Yet still they rode on, the moon overhead, a few thin clouds racing.

After some more miles, Mazzinghi let out a great whoop.

‘Brother,’ said Giustiniani sharply. ‘Less noise now.’

Then he relaxed his own horse into a trot and they all did likewise. He looked around at them and his eyes gleamed. Despite the bloodshed, despite the loss of the city, this was a moment of unreal exhilaration. They still lived, to fight another day.

Beyond a rise they came to a halt. The flanks of Nicholas’s horse were foaming and going like furnace bellows, and then it put out a hind leg and leaned at an unnatural angle.

‘Off!’ cried Hodge, and, seizing Nicholas, he dragged him sideways as the horse toppled away and fell on its side. Nicholas clambered to his feet where he sprawled in the dust, swiped his face and moved round to examine the poor beast.

The stricken animal’s breathing was shallow; blood coursed from its nostrils and its wide white eyes saw nothing. The breathing suddenly stopped, the flow of blood came to a halt.

‘Dismount all,’ said Giustiniani.

Even if the Sipahis still came on now, they had no dogs with them to follow the fugitives’ traces. They were surely safe.

They led the other five horses into an orchard of lemon trees. The air was sweet.

Nicholas looked back at the dead horse. Innocence died easy.

They found a deserted village and enough stale water in a stone trough to slake their horses’ thirst. But no more mounts, not even a mule or donkey. Nicholas would have to ride with Hodge. It was only another two or three leagues to the walls of Famagusta. They should make it by dawn or soon after.

They rested for half an hour and then walked on. They found a goat, tethered and unmilked, and drank her milk, a few mouthfuls each. Then they turned her loose. A little farther on there was a well, and Stanley pronounced it not poisoned. Nevertheless they drank slowly and carefully.

Behind them all was darkness still, and fallen Nicosia still burned. After three days of looting, no doubt the churches would be washed clean of Christian blood. The cathedral would be turned into a mosque and sanctified by prayer, the uncouth flagstones covered in fine carpets for the bare feet of the faithful. A Christian church was like a stable, and the Christians tramped in still wearing their dusty and grimy boots, even before their God.

In the east the sky was greying.

‘I think I can almost see the towers and spires of Famagusta,’ murmured Stanley. ‘Hear the waves breaking at the foot of her mighty walls.’

‘Is she really so beautiful a city as they say?’ asked Hodge.

‘A fairy-tale city built on sand, tawny as a lion . . . I think she is the most beautiful city I ever saw after Jerusalem.’

They shivered. Even the name sounded like poetry.

City of the vanished Lusignan Kings.

Lost city of the sand.

Fabled Famagusta
. . .

The outlying country around Famagusta was burned black, with barely a tree standing nor one stone upon another.

‘I’m impressed,’ said Smith. ‘What was his name again?’

‘Bragadino. Governor Bragadino. You remember we met his two sons in Sicily?’

Smith nodded, and Nicholas remembered them too. A pair of green-eyed panthers, softly spoken, watchful and lethal. He wished they were with their father now.

The sun was just up and the day brightening fast. They wanted to be within the walls soon.

There was a pool in a hollow, but it smelt foul. Already poisoned,
like every well in the district. Nevertheless Mazzinghi knelt down beside it.

‘Drink that, you’ll never see the fair ladies of Famagusta,’ said Stanley.

Mazzinghi said, ‘Just checking my bandage.’

Smith frowned. ‘Let me see the wound.’

Mazzinghi sprang to his feet again. ‘The wound is fine. I just want my bloody bandage to look its best when we ride into the city.’

Smith’s eyes bulged.

Mazzinghi turned side-on to give the battered older knight a view of his damnably handsome young features, offset by the broad white bandage around his wide forehead. ‘I think, of all the accessories a soldier can sport to win the ladies, a fresh bloody bandage about the forehead is the best,’ he said. ‘Somehow a bandage about the foot or the thigh is just not so effective. It doesn’t set off one’s noble visage nearly so well.’

Smith said, ‘Though as a Knight of St John, the thought of fair ladies never crosses your mind.’

‘Of course not,’ said Mazzinghi with a grin. ‘Heaven forbid.’

There was one hut suspiciously untouched, and inside a table with a ripe goat’s cheese on a wooden trencher. Nicholas eyed it longingly.

‘I wouldn’t,’ said Stanley.

‘What if we cook it?’

He shook his head. ‘That won’t destroy the poison.’

Smith kicked the table hard, the cheese shot to the floor and he stomped it into the earth. ‘That wouldn’t have fooled the Turks for a moment,’ he said. ‘But they’d have fed it to a prisoner, to test it, and he’d have died.’

It was Hodge who first said he could see towers and spires through the heat haze. They rode on a little, and then it was unmistakable. A fairy tale of a city indeed, something out of an ancient chapbook or prayerbook, Gothic lances of stonework rising into the shimmering burning air. A mighty wall all around it, and the tang of the sea on the air.

Nicholas twisted behind Hodge and reached into his small knapsack and drew out a familiar square of old cloth. He shook it out in front of Smith, red rag to a bull.

The Standard of Malta.

‘You . . .’ Smith scowled. ‘You took it down from the walls? You carried it through captivity? Why on earth did you not hand it to me, then? If they had found it on you, boy, they would have put you to the torture in an instant.’

Nicholas pushed the cloth into Smith’s hands. ‘I forgot I had it,’ he said vaguely.

‘You
forgot
? You lie.’

The boy turned away and he and Hodge heeled the horse and it clopped forward again, tired head nodding.

Smith and Stanley and Giustiniani sat their horses a moment and looked after them. The rising sun haloed the two riders in bronze sunlight, their thin grubby figures almost silhouetted. Each of them but twenty-two years of age, and to veteran knights like these, mere boys still. And yet what a pair. The faithful, long-suffering Hodge, shrewd survivor; and Nicholas himself, wanderer, exile, vagabond, robbed of his rightful inheritance, world-weary but still full of young desire for the world.

‘If I didn’t know him for a worthless tosspot and whoremonger,’ murmured Stanley, ‘I’d say Master Ingoldsby had kept a hold on that standard deliberately. So that if it was found by our captors, he would have been punished for it and not you.’

Smith rubbed his beard. ‘As tosspots and whoremongers go, perhaps he isn’t the worst.’

Then Giustiniani pointed towards a scurry of dust over the plain, and said, ‘We have company.’

‘Another good sign,’ said Stanley. ‘Dandolo never did outriders.’

‘Draw up!’ cried Smith. ‘No weapons!’ And he shook out the Standard of Malta and held it high.

Stanley had a vision of how it might appear to a passing bird. Their tiny group, so small upon the vast burnt plain, six men on five horses, surrounded by a troop of disciplined cavalry, lances lowered, forming a tight circle.

The cavalry captain sat his jouncing horse and demanded, ‘Who goes here?’

‘God with you,’ said Giustiniani. ‘Knights of St John and gentlemen volunteers. All six of us.’ He smiled, nodding towards Famagusta. ‘We are come to save your poor city.’

The captain said, ‘We know Nicosia is finished. How far off is the Turk? Our scouts have reported nothing.’

‘Another day or two,’ said Giustiniani. ‘We have ridden hard all night. And we are not pulling cannon.’

‘Follow me. Fast trot!’

As they neared the city Nicholas saw how magnificently built it was, three landward walls and a fourth seaward, the waves indeed lapping at its base as Stanley had said. Walls second only to those of Jerusalem or Consantinople, so it was said. But the walls of Nicosia, too, had been impressive. What gave him most heart, after the wretched past few weeks, was the sense of crisp order and efficiency. It had him sitting up straighter on his nodding horse, weary and famished as he was.

A postern gate was opened and they rode in and dismounted. They led their horses through a maze of hot dusty streets, gloomy arched passageways and steeply-roofed towers. Everything was an orderly bustle, soldiers everywhere, men and women with barrows, a little boy and girl, brother and sister, carrying a single cannonball between them in a sling of cloth. Two burly bearded priests, perspiring heavily in their black robes, silver crosses on their chests, carrying rocks on their shoulders to the walls.

The sense of steely determination was palpable. Their hearts swelled within them. A city of men and women and children prepared to stand and fight against a huge invading army. Nicholas had half forgotten the pity and the pathos of it. Malta all over again. And then, far more than Malta, Famagusta was a city of such ghostly, breathtaking beauty. A city of three hundred and sixty-five churches, it was said, one for every day of the year, and each more lovely than the last. Neat Orthodox chapels with rounded walls and golden domes, lancet windows and Gothic arches in the French style, St George of the Latins, St George of the Greeks, churches
of the Armenians, Nestorians, Syrian Jacobites, Copts, Franciscans . . . and everywhere, priests in black and friars in brown, working among the people, sweating and dusty as any.

‘Like Outremer before the fall . . .’ murmured Stanley.

All of it surrounded by two miles of formidable walls fifty feet high, twenty feet thick and now massively bulked by the ceaseless labours of the citizens. Five main gates, fifteen bastions, a deep dry ditch. The great Lion of Venice, carved in stone, high over the sea gate, glaring out unblinking over the burning Mediterranean. The citadel and the Great Hall of the Lusignans, the palace of the Governor ornamented with granite columns taken from nearby ancient Salamis, palm trees rustling in the breeze, and gorgeous flags and standards high on the battlements. The streets a swarming entrepôt of Levantine exiles, Phoenician merchants from Beirut and Tyre, Jews, Syrians, Greeks, Italians, Alexandrians. Crusader chapels, fountains and courtyards, back alleys with cool, shadowy taverns exuding the aroma of sweet Cyprus wine. And in the heart of the city, the magnificent St Nicholas cathedral, modelled on the cathedral of Rheims itself. Like a Gothic fantasy stranded on the shores of a desert island . . .

It was like being back in the times of Saladin and Richard Coeur-de-lion. Jerusalem the Golden was near now, where Christ himself had walked. Just across that sparkling sea.

‘Farthing for your thoughts,’ said Stanley, but Nicholas just smiled.

He was thinking, Here would be a fair place to fight and die, if I must.

‘I’ll tell you my thoughts,’ said Smith.

Stanley sighed. ‘If you must. But I’m not paying for them.’

‘I’m thinking, Famagusta is the toughest nut in the eastern Mediterranean. She will stand for months. And if Don John and the Holy League attacked the Ottoman fleet at sea, once siege is engaged here, we could destroy the power of the Turk utterly.’

‘Hope and pray, Fra John,’ said Stanley. ‘Hope and pray.’

Grooms took their shabby, tired horses, and they were led into a courtyard of the Governor’s palace. No waiting this time. The moment the Governor heard there were fugitives from Nicosia, he came out to them.

A tall man of some sixty years of age, scion of one of Venice’s noblest families. Black doublet and hose, long white hair elegantly combed back over the ears, a grave expression, and searching eyes. Green eyes, like his sons.

‘God save you. You come with news of Nicosia?’

‘All bad news,’ said Giustiniani. ‘The city is fallen with great loss of life, great brutality. We escaped only by the grace of God and trickery. Now the siege army of Lala Mustafa is marching this way. He will expect your instant surrender, like Kyrenia and Lemessos.’

Governor Bragadino grimaced. ‘Numbers? Our scouts estimated some fifty thousand.’

‘More. Seventy thousand, and with the usual complement of guns. But it was the mines that finished Nicosia.’

‘As usual. And a relief fleet from Venice was seen near Crete, but has now turned back. You heard this too?’

‘Aye. We heard it.’

Bragadino’s eyes glittered, impossible to read. ‘Come. You look half starved. Eat and drink.’

Giustiniani introduced them all as they walked inside.

‘Knights of St John are always welcome at a siege,’ said Bragadino. ‘Although I see you have not a weapon nor a scrap of armour among you. And Commander Piero del Monte might have sent more of a relief force than four.’

‘With respect, sire, we hardly made it across Cyprus as it was. And Piero del Monte is holding the knights in readiness for the Holy League, and the final confrontation. He believes it will be a sea battle. A clash of two galley fleets, such as the world has never seen.’

Bragadino nodded thoughtfully. ‘Well, you are welcome now, especially after Malta. And as for the two travelling Englishmen . . .’

‘They too fought at Malta.’

Bragadino eyed Nicholas and Hodge with a new curiosity. ‘Did they indeed? Hm.’

He ordered platefuls of food for them all, jugs of cool water fresh drawn from the well, sweet Cyprus wine. ‘After this, you can sleep.’