The Last Crusaders: The Great Siege (21 page)

An old man said, ‘Some say the moon has lakes and seas on it, as you can see at night.’

‘If I say the moon is lifeless,’ said Franco Briffa, ‘then it is lifeless.’

All the huts and dwellings beyond the walls of Senglea and Birgu were razed. The dirt-poor inhabitants, driving forth their goats, leading their children, infants in arms, did not weep or protest. They set down their infants and tethered their goats and went back and razed their huts and dwellings themselves.

‘Well,’ said one woman, looking over the blank landscape, face
grim, ‘a poor dwelling it was anyway, and will not not take much to rebuild. When the Turks are defeated.’

These people
, thought Nicholas, hefting a load of timber on his shoulder and trudging back up to the city gates. They are made of the same rock as their island.

Word spread like wildfire that Don Garcia de Toledo, the Spanish Viceroy of Sicily, had sailed into the Grand Harbour under cover of darkness, spoken hurriedly with La Valette, and vanished again before dawn.

‘Like a thief in the night,’ said Smith. ‘And did he bring any Spanish tercios with him?’

De Guaras laughed sourly. ‘He left not so much as a perfumed fart.’

Yet Stanley said it was no mean thing for Don Garcia to make the crossing from Sicily to Malta, so late in the day. He was but a servant of King Philip, and Don Garcia would have reminded La Valette that even Spain, greatest of the Christian powers, could put to sea a navy of only thirty-five fully manned war galleys. The navy of Suleiman the Magnificent numbered an unimaginable hundred and seventy galleys or more. If Spain went up against the Turk face-to-face, it would be utterly destroyed. Even if all the Christian powers were to unite under a single banner – not a likely eventuality – they would still be hard-pressed to meet such a force. Philip must guard his own kingdom before he could save Malta. If it were possible, relief would be sent. But for now, the knights must fight alone.

Don Garcia de Toledo had offered to take away as many women and children and elderly as his ship could carry back to the safety of Sicily, though the people had refused in one voice.

‘Wise decision,’ said De Guaras. ‘The people know well that if the Turk takes Malta, he will fall upon Sicily soon enough anyway.’

For a mile out of the city and more, the ground was stripped of cover and scorched black. Last year’s wheat was brought into Birgu and Senglea, and carried down into cool dry underground storerooms, part of a labyrinthine system of tunnels hewn into solid
rock beneath the city. They stored further food cargoes captured by the Chevalier Romegas on his ceaseless raids on Muslim shipping. It was not jewels and silks, spices and gold that would avail them now, but barley and raisins, dried fish and salt meat, and Arab medicines of the finest to treat wounds and fevers.

Quartermasters counted in ten thousand bushels of grain, huge rounds of Gozo cheese, dried tunny, olive oil, sacks of sesame seeds and Damascus dates. The vast water cisterns were still almost full from the winter rains, and there were several springs never known to fail within the walls.

All wells and springs without the walls were poisoned with a foul mix of hemp, flax and ordure. Though water was the very stuff of life, there was no hesitation. Nothing would be left for the invader but bare rock and burning sun. This was war. War to the knife.

Sometimes wells were even poisoned with arsenic, or a dead animal.

‘That’ll take some cleaning after,’ said one.

‘But we will have numberless Mohammedan slaves to work for us,’ said another.

From the high battlemented walls of San Angelo, at the northern tip of Birgu, La Valette looked down. San Angelo would take a battering before it fell. Grim fortress walls topped by another, higher inner enclosure, thickly battlemented. It was good to let the eye roam over its massive proportions. Angled bastions, slanted parapets for deflecting direct hits, splayed gun ports, inner defensive lines – the new architecture of defence in the age of gunpowder.

He looked repeatedly towards the eastern horizon, and westward over the island. But he also looked north with a thoughtful expression, at Mount Sciberras, the great bare promontory that formed the opposite side of the Grand Harbour. There had been much talk of building a grand new city there, in a far more commanding position than the little huddled towns of Birgu and Senglea. Or at least an imposing new fort.

But it was all talk, and no money. Nothing had been done. Even the single modest building there now had not been rebuilt or strengthened in any way, and it was there that La Valette’s gaze fell. The small, star-shaped fort of St Elmo. Unlike San Angelo, the
little fort on Mount Sciberras was hardly of the latest design.

He sent across work parties to do what they could to strengthen the walls, and ordered them to build an outlying ravelin on its far side, in the unlikely event that the Turks should ever try to attack St Elmo overland.

He also allowed them a few more cannons, though Birgu and San Angelo were already cruelly short of firepower. The might of the Ottoman fist would of course fall upon Birgu and San Angelo. Yet St Elmo guarded the mouth of the Grand Harbour, and before the Turks could anchor their great armada there safely, it would have to be reduced.

Suddenly a cry went up.

‘A ship! A ship!’

Nobody panicked, but many rushed to the walls and strained their eyes eastwards. It had begun.

But it was only a single ship, and it came from the north, from Sicily. A long, low galley with a hull painted blood red and glistening with tallow for more speed, and flying a matching red flag with a white cross. Even its progress around the headland and into the harbour was somehow dauntless, unhurried, unafraid of the hundred galleys coming its way.

A great cheer went up from the walls.

It was the Chevalier Mathurin Romegas, bringing in more supplies, more Muslim captive slaves to work in chain gangs on the walls, and above all, two hundred Spanish tercios: the finest infantrymen in Europe. Don Garcia de Toledo had persuaded King Philip to send reinforcements after all. An absurdly small number, against the approaching Ottoman horde. But spirits greatly rose to see them.

Romegas himself had a long fine nose, a straggly beard, deep-set eyes circled with dark rings, like a man who slept little, and as Nicholas observed him making his way up to the palace of the Grand Master, Romegas’s hands shook badly.

Saluting the march past, Stanley said sidelong to Nicholas, ‘Do not think that his hands shake for fear. Since he joined the Knights at the age of fourteen, Romegas has shown himself the most fearless of any. He is of the noble house of Armagnac – and a proud Frenchman.’

‘A Gascon,’ said Smith. ‘It’s different.’

‘Once his galley was capsized and he survived underwater for twelve hours with his head in an air pocket. Something happens to a man who has looked death so close in the eye. He becomes more free. Romegas’s hands shake only because of nervous damage. But he has destroyed more than fifty Ottoman galleys, liberated more than a thousand slaves. It was he who captured the Ottoman treasure ship the
Sultana
and set in train this great assault on our island.’

‘Not that Romegas would apologise to anyone for that,’ said Smith.

‘No indeed.’ Stanley smiled faintly. ‘To have provoked Suleiman to outright war is probably his proudest achievement yet.’

The Spanish tercios followed Romegas, wearing their breastplates and tall morion helmets for show, and carrying their long, lethal pikes. They had a strange, almost sinister air, these hard-bitten veterans, sons of the high, bleak plains of Castile and Estremadura. Conquistadors, with faces darkened by a tropical sun, eyes distant and cold, and souls as hard as iron. They came from the New World, where they had been fighting the Christless Indians, seeing and committing who knew what atrocities there. Yet they would fight ferociously, these men, and even the heat of a Mediterranean summer might seem easy to them after the burning sun of the Peruvian Andes, or the humid jungles of Panama with its swamps, fevers and the cries of its nameless night creatures.

‘This is a war that involves the whole world,’ said Stanley softly, as if in slow realisation. ‘A war of all four continents. These soldiers returned from the Americas, paid with Inca silver, to fight in Europe against an army of Africans and Asians, and an Empire that rules to the borders of Tartary and Persia.’

‘And all focused on this tiny island in the sea,’ said Smith. ‘Like a glass focusing the sun, and burning a hole through parchment.’

La Valette promptly dictated the new arrivals their stations, and then had them help to arm the walls and bring up supplies. Not barley and dates now, but grimmer materials. Bandages and wadding, splints, flasks of alcohol. Spare recoil ropes for the culverins, arquebus balls in cases and cannonballs stacked in neat
pyramids. Assembled pot guns that threw brass bombs full of Greek fire, clay pots of naphtha and fire hoops pasted with evil concoctions that would adhere to clothing and flesh and not cease from burning even underwater: pitch and tar, phosphorus and magnesium, even date wine and honey to make the stuff stick.

The knights knew every secret of siege warfare, and how to fight when hopelessly outnumbered, using the utmost aggression and every destructive martial device known to man.

The Spanish infantrymen and the knights set up high trajectory mortars to arc over the walls like arrows, needing no risky sighting or aiming. La Valette also gave orders for huge casks of water to be set up at regular intervals around the walls of Birgu and Senglea, both for drinking and for extinguishing the deadly fires that would soon be burning.

‘Before long,’ the soldiers joked, with the black humour of soldiers in all ages, ‘we’ll be tossing dead bodies down on ’em. That always causes a stink.’

La Valette disliked such jesting. They must all be worthy of their cause, even these rough-hewn soldiers. He had them go through the town and pick men of likely age, and give them rudimentary fire-arms training.

Their commanding officer was a Captain Miranda, a huge, powerfully built fellow with a great black moustache and lantern jaw, who looked like he might best even John Smith in a fight. He lined up his hasty citizen militia and told them,

‘If one of my men gets his head blown off, and drops his gun or his sword in the dust, you’re onto it in a trice. You hear me? Peasants and fishermen you may be, but you know how to spear a tuna. Well then, you can spear a Turk. We are short of everything in this coming battle. Have no respect for the dead. They will be past caring. Take up their weapons and keep fighting. It is your only hope. That and the mercy of God.’

La Valette heard the words of this Captain Miranda and liked what he heard. He ordered him to prepare a company of thirty of his soldiers to be sent over the water to St Elmo and join the station there, under the command of the stout Italian, Luigi Broglia.

‘But not yet,’ he said. ‘There remains work to do here. The
moment the Grand Fleet is seen, your men will row over. You will remain here with the rest.’

He also asked for any volunteers among the knights. There was reluctance. St Elmo was a poor second to the main battle.

At last Stanley said, ‘Sire, for St John and St George, I will go.’

‘Then I too,’ said Smith.

Nicholas and Hodge counted themselves in also, and La Valette addressed them gravely, as only he could.

‘Be ready to cross over the moment the Turks are seen. It is the great battle between the Cross and the Koran which is now to be fought. We are the chosen soldiers of the Cross, and if Heaven requires the sacrifice of our lives, there can be no better occasion than this. Hasten to the sacred altar, my brothers, and be blessed with that contempt for death which alone can render us invincible.’

The waiting was the worst. No surprise it drove men mad. One hanged himself in the market square, with a note pinned to his breast asking for Allah to admit him to Paradise. Passers-by spat on the corpse of the traitor.

It made no sense. Even the Maltese people began to crack.

‘Let it come soon,’ murmured Stanley. ‘Please God.’

The sun burned down on an empty sea.

In the town, rumours flew. Spies were widely suspected. A fellow walking on the walls at night was said to be signalling to the enemy. He protested that it was only the moonlight glinting on his belt buckle, but he was beaten anyway. The next morning a Jewish family were dragged into the street and accused of allying with the Turks. Some kicked dust in their faces, and one or two even picked up stones.

La Valette had been laying the keys to the city on the altar in the Church of St John, praying to the patron saint of the Order for their protection. Hearing the news he came running, as easy as a man thirty years his junior, face black as thunder. Without a word he fell upon a man raising a stone and cuffed him to the ground with a terrific blow. Others instantly dropped their stones and lowered their faces, stepping back.

‘Ay, you cowards of men!’ said La Valette. He raised up the
family of Jews where they knelt in the dust, still praying their Hebrew prayers.

‘What is your name?’

‘Isaac, Lord.’

‘Father Isaac. Your family is safe. These scoundrels will not touch a hair of your head. Go home.’

To the mob already beginning to disperse, towering over them, he said, ‘You fools! You look like none so much as those baying brutes who stoned St Stephen, our first martyr, so righteous in their own eyes. Any spies or traitors in this city are my business. Now depart!’

On the morning of the 18th May, Nicholas was on the walls with Hodge when a Spanish soldier ahead of them suddenly stood very stiff-backed, staring out to sea. He was as still as a hunting dog on the trace.

They raced to his side. ‘What? What?’

He said nothing, still staring. He was young, twenty-two or so, and his eyes were good. They stared also. Nothing. No, but … wait. The blue horizon there … what was that? As if flecked with white. As if edged with white horses. But on so calm a day …