The Last Crusaders: Blood Red Sea (34 page)

‘What?’

‘More buckets than you would expect in an ordinary household. And a pile of earth in the fireplace, which seems curious, does—’

Smith tossed Abdul aside like a discarded cloak and hurtled inside. Stanley steadied him and kept his hand heavy on his shoulder.

‘You still think I betray you, Christian? After all we have been through.’

‘I advise you to be silent a while.’

The Moor stood placidly with his hands folded before him.

‘Show me your hands.’

Abdul did so.

Not a spot of earth on them, fingernails as clean as a queen’s.

‘What were you doing in this house?’

‘I thought you told me to be silent.’

Stanley gave him a gentle shake, which made Abdul’s head loll like a puppet’s. ‘I am kinder than my Brother John,’ he said, ‘but not that kind.’

‘Very well, very well. I keep my ear to the ground. I observe. I trade in fine garments, in jewels, in muskets, but most precious of all, information. The moment that south-west bastion went down, I started looking about me. It just took you a little longer to work it out.’ He shrugged. ‘Had I been Governor Bragadino, I would have ordered every house within fifty yards of the walls to be razed to the ground before the siege even started.’

Stanley felt his jaw tighten. The Moor was right, damn him.

In a city as mixed and polyglot as Famagusta, there were always traitors.

Smith hauled two men out howling, apparently by the hair, and dropped them like sacks in the dust. From their bruised and bloody faces, it looked as if he had banged their heads together like bowling balls quite a bit already.

‘One Bohemian, one of the Kingdom of Serbia, I think. Look at their fingernails.’

Stanley trod on their hands. ‘How much are they paying you?’

One howled. The other jabbered.

‘In Italian, or some cultivated tongue at least.’

One said, ‘Our freedom only! No gold, no silver, just our lives at the end of it.’

‘Fools as well as traitors,’ said Smith. ‘You really think Lala Mustafa would trouble to find you and save you if this city falls?’

The man sobbed. Smith drew his sword and touched the edge to his neck.

Bragadino came cantering down the street on horseback with two lancers.

‘Is there any more to learn? You two vermin, are there any more saboteurs among us?’

The man wept and shook his head. ‘I do not know.’

‘Understand this,’ said Bragadino. ‘You are to die before nightfall. Think carefully and tell me all you know. Soon you will be before the Throne of Judgement.’

He controlled his sobbing and said softly, ‘There are no others I know of, I swear it.’

‘You mined the Martinengo bastion? Just the two of you?’

‘Impossible,’ said Smith.

‘We stored powder in the crypt of the church of St John Chrysostomos. It was not so far to dig, and there was an ancient culvert too. It was not the best mining, but with the cannon fire as well it was enough.’

‘You have been the death of many good Christians,’ said Bragadino. ‘You should fear what is to come.’

‘I fear it,’ the man said, trembling. ‘Sweet Jesus, I do fear it.’

‘They have no more to tell,’ said Bragadino. ‘Imminent death often makes a man truthful.’

Smith and Stanley nodded their agreement.

Bragadino relieved the knights themselves of the squalid task, and ordered his men to dismount and draw their swords.

The traitors’ heads were struck off in the street before a watching crowd, and their bodies thrown over the walls.

Bragadino looked grave. ‘It was my error,’ he said, ‘a gross error.’

‘May we ask why the houses were not razed before?’

‘To appease the damned merchants. They demanded not a building should be touched. Now they are overruled.’

Every house, every stable, every donkey shack within fifty yards of the walls was pulled down and razed that night, the material carried to the walls for precious bulking. Some of it was used to refill the tunnel they found under the traitors’ house, a foul damp burrow badly propped and leaking sand. A poor thing, but stretching underneath the walls of Fort Andruzzi, in concert with a heavy barrage from beyond, it might have played a crucial part.

Even a fine acacia tree was cut down, along with two merchant houses with splendid courtyards and upper galleries, an ancient Byzantine chapel, first hurriedly deconsecrated by a priest. He carried away the icons by torchlight, his face wet with tears.

Groups of merchants in fine robes and gowns looked on, muttering among themselves.

Nicholas awoke with a Franciscan friar bending over his leg and bathing it.

‘My foot has gone,’ he mumbled. ‘Blown away. I am lamed for life.’

The friar looked up. He was slightly hunchbacked, with a snub nose, and amazingly bushy grey eyebrows which curved up at the ends, making him look like a comical demon.

‘Both feet still present,’ he said, ‘though one a little cut about and worse for wear. Brain soused in opium, though. I’d sleep if I were you.’

It was dark when a visitor came. Stanley himself.

‘I brought you an orange.’

Nicholas turned his head on the pillow. ‘Opium.’

‘You’ve had enough to fly to the moon and back.’

The knight squeezed the fruit to a pulp in his bare fist and the juice poured into a silver goblet.

‘Show-off,’ murmured Nicholas.

Stanley grinned. His hands were black with powder and burns, and his knuckles grazed and bleeding.

‘I don’t mind the gunpowder so much,’ said Nicholas, ‘but I’d rather not taste your blood.’

‘It’ll be good for you. The blood of English earls runs in these veins.’

He held up the boy’s head and put the goblet to his lips. The juice was sharp and sweet and delicious.

He lay back. ‘More.’

‘I’ll bring more.’

If I can find more, he thought. The city was already feeling its isolation, cut off from the surrounding countryside and no ships coming or going in the harbour. And the Ottoman guns had already destroyed two grain stores.

‘What happened at the bastion?’ asked Nicholas.

Stanley set down the goblet. ‘Your heroic little endeavour did some good. The arch came down, a few enemy were killed, just when we were hard pressed. Baglione was hurt in the fighting, though.’

‘Badly?’

A second’s hesitation. ‘He will mend, I’m sure. The Turks pulled back disheartened. Though I know you are strong enough to want the truth, and not heroical bombast. What really saved us, while we hacked and bludgeoned away there, was the work of Bragadino in the city. The moment the Janizaries gave us respite, we looked around and there were – I do not exaggerate – a thousand, two thousand, of the townsfolk in perfect columns, bearing sandbags, earth sacks, pushing barrows. They filed in one by one and filed out again, obedient as nuns. Bragadino supervising. Each one left and then came back and rejoined the queue with another sack. Cushions full of stones and sawdust. Pillowcases stuffed with straw. Anything.

‘The people worked the rest of the day, in rotation. Perhaps one in every ten citizens was there, helping bulk up the broken Martinengo bastion. The work will go on all night, and by
dawn that shattered wall will not matter so much any more. For Martinengo will just be a great, squat, solid block of . . .
stuff
. We can’t use it any more, alas. But neither can the Turk take it. And it was this – the citizens and peasants and humble sacks of sand – that have really saved us for now.’

Nicholas said, ‘I am glad of it. Hanging there from my fingertips, I felt no hero. I felt like a Bedlam fool.’

Stanley grinned. ‘I’ll get you some more oranges.’

Outside, he paused for a while. Yes, he had told Ingoldsby the truth. It was an insult not to. But not the whole truth.

Not the dismal rumour that more and more of the town’s citizens, especially the wealthier and more influential of them, were talking about negotiated surrender.

The sturdy peasants and plain townsfolk would have none of it. They lived with death every day, and hated the Turk more than anything. But the wealthy merchants, many of them Venetian or Levantine, said they had no quarrel with the Sultan Selim. What matter who governed, as long as they could continue their trade in peace? And they wept to see their fine city houses and courtyards reduced to rubble and dust. Their wives harangued them further.

‘Surely,’ they said, ‘some
accommodation
can be made?’

Oh for a city full of Malta peasants, thought Stanley. They were a people made of rock.

There was one other strange turn that day. An Ottoman ball had gone into the house where the fifty Muslim pilgrims of the haj were sheltering, and it killed two of them. Some time later, the leader of the group came to Bragadino, and pleaded to be released.

‘Released? In the middle of a siege? Released where, man?’

Then he told their story. They were Muslim converts, from Wallachia. Only two generations ago, their families had still been Christian. But they were so oppressed and impoverished by the relentless taxes and punishments of their Muslim overlords that eventually, ‘God forgive us, we abjured the Cross and bowed to Mecca. As so many have done before us.’ And before the Governor’s astonished eyes, he crossed himself.

Bragadino decided to trust them. In a few days’ time, he promised
them, under cover of darkness, they would file silently aboard a galley in the harbour under the command of Romegas himself, slip past the Turkish patrols, and sail into the west.

Night time. Torchlight and cooking fires, dogs barking, muted talk. Eating and drinking, grimy faces, bowls and goblets slurped and guzzled. Water still plentiful, drunk by the quart.

No news from the lookouts on the walls, no sign of activity around the Turkish guns.

Suffering Christ, they might even get some sleep.

Two soldiers rigged up a pipe and pumped from a cistern, a cool gout of water at head height. Exhausted and filthy soldiers stripped and stood naked beneath it.

Women passing by screamed and giggled, half hid their faces with their headscarves and turned the other way. But not before having a swift look.

One well-built handsome Spaniard, muscular chest coursing cold water, scooped back his thick black hair, shook his beard and grinned at the women and called out, ‘I am glad we give you something to smile about, fair ladies, in these straitened times!’

They passed on with heads lowered, giggling like schoolgirls. More than one of them would dream of him tonight.

Priests of the Greek Church, Armenians, Dominicans and Franciscans, friars and nuns, said nothing to condemn such bawdiness, or the scenes they saw in taverns, stables, back alleys.
In extremis
, men and women would take what comfort they could.

They forgot their doctrinal differences and worked on through the long hot night.

They tended the wounded, drugged the dying, and buried the dead.

At dawn, word came that Astorre Baglione, Famagusta’s single finest military commander, had died in the night of his wounds. His last words were, ‘No surrender!’

Moments later, a huge bombardment opened up on the north-west corner of the city, against the sloping walls of Fort Andruzzi.

Dust went up. Flakes fell.

Nothing else.

Towards noon they stopped firing and the guns were rested.

Smith smiled grimly. ‘Think on it well, Lala Mustafa, you dog. It won’t always go your way.’

Bragadino looked grey. The responsibility was almost too much, even for so strong a man. His refusal to surrender had already sent a thousand soldiers to their deaths, perhaps another five hundred civilians. Ten thousand more, old men, women, children, depended upon him. And now he had lost Baglione.

‘He was my best commander. I have the military experience of any gentleman, but Astorre Baglione was my stay and staff. I will need your advice now.’

‘That’s why we’re here,’ said Giustiniani. ‘With our memories of Malta.’

There was another long, exhausting assault all afternoon until nightfall by countless regiments of Janizaries, infantry and dismounted Sipahis fighting as infantry as well. At one point Bragadino estimated there were as many as ten thousand men coming against
them. They brought up protective barriers, huge bundles of brushwood which they rolled into the fast-filling ditch, scaling ladders, ropes and grappling hooks.

‘If the moat is completely filled,’ said Giustiniani, ‘or strongly bridged, they could bring up siege towers.’

But they had enough on their hands as it was. Turks swarmed up the walls; many were cut down by enfilading fire from the towers, but they quickly learned that the Martinengo bastion itself was now unable to offer return fire. They scaled the walls nearest to it, and scores of men came up over the battlements. Only rapid reply by Bragadino saved the day, with two whole companies of pikemen already stationed there on the wide walls, able to encircle them and then cut them down.

There were no more sorties from the defenders. They were fighting to the point of exhaustion and beyond just to hold the walls.

At dusk the Turks pulled back.

Bragadino ordered a count.

Half an hour later came the sombre tally.

Of the four thousand men he had had under his command a week ago, over two thousand were now dead or severely wounded, beyond fighting. He had around 1,800 fighting men left, and few of them were unscathed.

Hard to estimate the Turkish losses. Four, five thousand at least.

‘But that still leaves us facing an army of sixty or seventy thousand,’ he said. ‘Pietro Giustiniani, what would you judge?’

‘As I have always judged,’ said Giustiniani. ‘We can still hold out a while. We can inflict great losses on the Turks, to the bitter end, forcing them to accept a victory at high cost. But we cannot win. We can only pray for relief.’

‘Yet no relief is coming. What then?’

‘Just possibly we could hold out until the onset of winter. Then they would have to abandon the siege anyway.’

‘Winter? It is still August. You truly think we could hold them back another three or four months? Another one hundred and twenty days’ assault like today?’