The Last Crusaders: Blood Red Sea (32 page)

They ducked back, for he had see the fizzing breech of a culverin in one of the side towers, and a moment later a hail of grapeshot sliced across the flank of the wall and blasted the men off the ladder. Then they reached down with the grappling poles and shoved the ladder clear.

More mines were going off in the moat all the time, more concealed grenades and pot-bombs and booby traps in pits. The
bastions roared their enfilading fire and, from the walls above, soldiers tossed down more grenades, sacks of quicklime, incendiaries of that evil mix called Greek fire in glass jars. Made from a mix of rock-oil, turpentine and anything sugary – date wine, fig syrup, even honey – it burst into flames and clung to men’s flesh even as it burned. Men rolled in the moat in hoops of their own flames, howling like the damned, as others fought to get away. Sweet Cyprus honey was turned into a device of slaughter, and any comradeship was destroyed by mutual terror.

The assault of the Bektasis, so early in the siege and with so little damage done to the walls, was as Stanley predicted. Bloody murder.

Then the Bektasis suddenly broken and fled. They had had enough. Paradise could wait.

The smoke slowly cleared and the defenders peered out. The moat was a vision of hell, a ditch of perhaps a thousand stretched and writhing bodies, men and parts of men.

The defenders had sustained a single casualty. One novice had burned his hand firing up a pot-bomb.

‘There’ll be more to come,’ said Bragadino grimly. ‘Like the ranging shots of the cannon this morning, this was only a test, was it not? Now the moat is already half filled with the slain. And almost all our traps and grenades down there have been detonated.’

Then he held his sword aloft and cried, ‘A famous victory, my brothers!’ and a great and heartening cheer went round the walls.

Sometimes the best thing a commander could do was put new spirit in his men by lying.

The Ottoman guns were being brought forward again.

This time it would not be a test. This time Lala Mustafa and his very finest gunnery masters would be aiming at the bases of the walls, towers, gates and bastions.

‘Keep your heads down,’ said Smith. ‘And wad your ears up or you’ll be deaf by sundown.’

The entire length of the west wall of Famagusta was under sustained assault from hurtling iron and stone. Nicholas had forgotten what it felt like to be under bombardment from two or three hundred cannon simultaneously. That is, his mind had not forgotten, but his body was shocked anew. His eardrums fluttered, his bones juddered, the air itself shook. The sound beat against him in blows and bludgeons.

And from within the city arose slow wails. The sickening thump of cannonball hitting walls and courtyards, fountains, chapels, churches, fine merchant houses and humble timber shacks. Infants screamed in their cradles, little girls buried their heads in their mothers’ skirts, still unable to shut out the terrible unceasing thunderstorm of the guns.

‘Return fire!’ cried Bragadino. ‘Hit their guns! Take them out one by one!’

But the Ottomans had such vastly superior manpower and resources, their slave gangs had already built for every gun a miniature earthen fortress. Still they must try.

‘Every day we hold out,’ said Stanley, ‘brings the Holy League one league nearer.’

Please God it was true.

Boys came round with pails and scoops of water, and they drank greedily. Others, called powder monkeys, came round with fresh powder and whatever smaller missiles they could carry. The gunners themselves brought up the bigger cannonballs. They returned fire as best they could. Smith kept trying with his jezail to take out a single gunner, even a gunnery master.

A church bell struck twelve noon.

And then three hundred black mouths of the enemy guns roared again and they all took cover.

‘Coming in!’

Most hit home with cruel accuracy, thumping into the base of the walls, sending up huge clouds of stone and mortar dust. The whole wall juddered.

A breathless messenger came running, saluting even as he ran, and gasped, ‘Big crack opened up beneath the Martinengo bastion, sire.’

‘Bag it up, man!’ cried Bragadino angrily. ‘We’re all out of mortar!’

A few balls went high and struck the sloping bastion tops, losing much of their power as they kicked up high above them, clearly visible.

‘One in the air!

Then everyone would watch and stumble out of the way as it came hurtling back down, on to tops or battlements, or falling within the city upon some house or tavern or shop roof, or thumping heavily into a sandy street or alley.

Boys came running out to see if they could pick it up.

‘Watch out!’ called Nicholas. ‘It’ll burn you!’

One boy squatted and touched the ball, half buried in the sand, with a wisp of dried grass. It smoked. He stared up at Nicholas wide eyed.

Sometimes a fired cannonball was hot and sometimes merely warm, without obvious reason. Later the boys would retrieve the balls in coarse slings and carry them back up to the walls to be
used in return. Soldiers would scratch messages on them with their knives.

‘Eat this, Mehmet.’

‘Up your Mohammedan arse.’

‘This one’s for the Prophet.’

Then again, some of those coming in from the Ottoman guns had the Lion of Venice stamped on them. Taken from Nicosia, and garlanded with similar greetings.

Stanley knelt and peered, and then said, ‘These fellows can’t even spell
turd
. Disgraceful.’

‘Coming in!’

And from the Martinengo bastion came a terrible sound. A multiple strike from three or four huge cannon, the ones they called basilisks – and another sound beneath it.

A deep, groaning judder: the sound of a wall giving way. The air filled with a cloud of ochre dust, far greater than any yet, blinding them all. And through the cloud of dust, from the Ottoman lines, a huge cheer.

Bragadino cried, ‘Smith, Stanley, take your men! I’ll send Baglione’s own company too, one of the best. Hold them back at the bastion, report to me what damage.’

They ran.

Across the plain, two huge columns of Janizaries were already racing towards the stricken bastion.

Even as they ran, another monstrous volley of cannon fire juddered through the air. A big gun needed resting and cooling for as much as half an hour after firing. Lala Mustafa must have such vast numbers of artillery pieces that he could fire rolling volley after volley, resting them in turn. There would be no respite, all day and all night. The Ottoman Empire was determined that Cyprus should not prove another Malta. And so far, everything was going as planned.

There were Venetian infantrymen streaming away from the Martinengo bastion, some covered in white plaster dust like ghosts.

‘Back to your positions!’ Smith bellowed at them. ‘Where are you going?’

One barged past him. ‘Who the fuck are you?’

A giant fist struck him down senseless.

‘That’ll really help,’ said Stanley.

The others clustered uncertainly, staring at this burly, terrifying-looking Knight of St John with his blazing black eyes.

Then the company commander, Astorre Baglione, came at the trot with his hundred-strong hand-picked company, the finest reserve troops in Famagusta. He barked orders even as he trotted, puffing with the effort for he was short and stoutly built.

‘Fall in, you sons of bitches! Martinengo’s not done yet! And it’ll be a whole lot worse for you if the Turk breaks in! Now move your lazy arses!’

Buoyed up by the fresh troops, the soldiers from the Martinengo bastion turned and lumbered back the way they had come.

The fellow at Smith’s feet stirred and groaned.

‘Lie there,’ said Smith. ‘Sun yourself a while.’

Then there was a cruel whirring sound in the air, and they all ducked down, heads low, in the shadow of a wall.

But not a powder-boy, a leather satchel of black gunpowder over his shoulder, staring open mouthed into the blue air. No more than six or seven.

‘Get down!’ screamed Nicholas, and made to run to him.

Then the missile struck. It was marble, specifically intended to shatter on impact, and send shards of sharp white stone flying in all directions. It struck the top of a wall, exploded, and the boy went down.

Nicholas raced to him and pulled him over on his back. His smooth young face was stuck with lean white splinters, and he was screaming.

Then Stanley was kneeling beside him too. ‘You go on!’ he shouted to the others. ‘We’ll join you!’

He raised the boy’s head from the dust, fingers in his hair. There were more splinters in his skull, but he didn’t find what he dreaded. A split in the skull, or a shard as long as a man’s finger, embedded straight down.

The boy screamed and screamed; it was no good telling one so young not to. He had a right to scream. With astonishing
concentration and gentleness, kneeling there in the dusty street with cannonballs flying and falling beyond them in the heart of the city, and the sound of many people running, shouting, a ruinous pandemonium, Stanley’s powerful fingers moved with the delicacy of a lacemaker’s. He plucked the shards from the boy’s cheeks, forehead, one from his neck, one from just above his lip, and several from his skull beneath his child-fine hair. Numerous little trails of blood ran down the boy’s face, trickling into the corners of his mouth, and Stanley wiped them away with his neckerchief.

At last he was satisfied and stood and raised the boy up in his arms.

‘I’ll take him,’ said Nicholas. ‘You go and fight.’

Stanley considered briefly, then nodded and passed him the sobbing child. ‘Not over your shoulder. Keep his head up or he’ll only bleed the more. Find the Franciscan friars if you can. Though they’ll be busy.’

‘Will I die? Will I die?’ wailed the little boy as Nicholas hurried as best he could through the streets, almost blinded with the dust, ducking into doorways every time he heard another whine, another thump.

‘You won’t die,’ said Nicholas. ‘I won’t let you.’

‘It hurts! Why does it hurt so much?’

One of those questions no man could answer. He hurried on, arms already aching with the sobbing burden.

He came into a small square – a dead mule, a shattered bell tower, a hubbub of people. Then through the dust clouds he saw a familiar shape in a black dress. She saw him and came towards him.

‘You’re limping,’ he said.

‘It’s nothing,’ she said swiftly. ‘Just my age.’

He glanced down. Beneath her dress he could see that one of her bare feet was bloody and bandaged.

‘Let me take him. You are needed on the walls.’

He passed her the boy, and she kissed away the bloody trickles on his forehead. ‘There, my lamb, my pet. Tell me your name.’

His sobbing diminished a little at this warm maternal touch, the rich smell of her dark hair. He stuttered, ‘Andreas.’

‘Come then, Andreas, we will find your mama and make you better.’

‘My mama fell down in the street this morning.’

She exchanged an agonised look with Nicholas.

‘Men in black robes took her away,’ the boy said, starting to sob again.

Sweet Jesus.

‘Maybe the Dominicans,’ said Nicholas, ‘they’ve been caring for the wounded too.’

‘I’ll try.’ She was already going.

‘What is
your
name?’ he called after her.

‘Evangelina.’

And she was gone.

He ran back to the Martinengo bastion. The sound of grim tumult and steel on steel came to his ears.

He prayed as he ran. For the little boy, for his mother. For the widow Evangelina.

For the whole damn city.

The little boy’s pain, and the running, sweat coursing down his forehead from under the tight-fitting morion, and the unreal sights of a city being pulverised yet still refusing to surrender – the chaos and cruelty of it all, too great to be reduced to words – all of it filled him with the familiar old battle fury that seemed to slow everything down around him. As he ran into the mêlée, he saw ahead of him that the great south-west Martinengo bastion was already half in ruins. A gaping wound opened straight out on to the plain where the south wall had stood, and yet above, a huge, half-broken arch still hung overhead, apparently supported by thin air, threatening to crash down upon them at any moment and bury them in a hundred tons of Cyprus sandstone.

All of them. Venetians and Spaniards and Ottomans alike.

For the Janizaries were upon them.

The wall had collapsed into a massive ramp of rubble and broken stonework, steep sided and some thirty feet high, and two groups of men were bitterly contesting this piece of worthless ruin. The ramp was hemmed in between those walls still standing, forming
a front no more than fifty yards wide. Yet beyond, many more Janizaries pressed forward, rank upon rank. If they could only break in here, form a bridgehead of this one bastion and throw open the gates – the city could be overrun by thousands of enemy troops in minutes.

And they were nearly in already.

Nicholas clawed his way up the rubble ramp with drawn sword just as an Ottoman order rang out and all the Janizaries fell back and crouched.

‘Down!’ yelled Baglione, but many of the inexperienced pikemen were too late. Over the heads of their crouching front rank, the rear rank of Janizary musketeers fired a perfectly timed volley from less than twenty yards away.

Two of their own were hit by musket balls that spun erratically from the barrel – it was a dangerous tactic – but the rest of the volley raked into the stumbling line of defenders, taking down as many as twenty or thirty still standing. One fell backwards on top of Nicholas. He dragged himself out from underneath the dead weight, sheathed his sword and snatched up the man’s pike.

‘Attack!’ roared a familiar voice. It was Smith.

Maximum aggression, surprise, ferocity at every moment. Especially the least expected moment. That was the secret of the knights’ fearsome reputation.

Now desperate, exposed, a key bastion already half blown away, defenders outnumbered ten or twenty to one, and their attackers without question the finest infantrymen in all of Christendom or Asia, Smith was leading his comrades in a sudden assault, scrambling down the ramp and into the startled enemy ranks.