The Last Crusaders: The Great Siege (23 page)

There were olives and prickly pear and Fiori de Pasqua, but it was a hard, bitter landscape. Nicholas imagined High Spain and the Castilian plain was like this, only immeasurably more vast. What a land to fight for.

They rode down past the villages of Zabbar and Zeitun, and watched in bafflement as the Grand Fleet still sailed on, past Marsasirocco Bay and north again up the west coast, past the bird island of Filfla, haunted by the souls of the dead. They rode across to Zurrieq, and then north along the forbidding heights of the cliffs of Dingli.

‘Perhaps they sail for Ghain Tuffieha Bay?’ said De la Rivière.

Copier grunted. It was a poor anchorage compared to Marsasirocco.

Night began to fall, and on a millpond sea, the fleet dropped anchor. Nicholas thought of the fleet of Agamemnon off the coast of Troy. The ships rode serenely on their hawsers as if with nothing to fear. Ghain Tuffieha and Gejna were but small bays with golden sand, just enough for them to anchor, and very far from St Angelo. A two or three hour march for a man with a pack. But dragging the siege guns …

‘My fear is they will station between Malta and Gozo,’ said Copier. ‘That way they will cut off any hope of our relief from Sicily.’

De la Rivière hadn’t thought of that. He looked grave.

Laughter and shouts in Turkish sounded over the water. ‘
Arkada
ş
! Ak
ş
am yeme
ğ
i!
’ Lanterns were lit, dinners cooked on the steady decks. Spirits were sky-high. ‘
Zefer!
’ Victory! They would land unopposed.

Copier’s cavalry troop unrolled their blankets and ate dry rations and slept. Faraone kept the first watch.

Nicholas had brought neither food nor blanket. He huddled against a south-facing wall, belly rumbling, and slept little. Vagabond again.

At dawn the one hundred and eighty galleys raised anchor and sailed south once more.

‘Playing games,’ muttered Copier.

‘At least they’re not anchoring off Gozo,’ said De la Rivière. ‘You think relief may yet come?’

Copier said nothing. Who could tell?

He despatched two of the Spanish soldiers back to Birgu to tell La Valette the fleet was sailing south again, probably for Marsasirocco.

‘You know the Grand Master dislikes
probablies
,’ said Don Mezquita.

Copier grunted. ‘Very well. Just say they’re sailing south.’

Copier was right though. The Grand Fleet returned to the broad bay of Marsasirocco and anchored and began to disembark. The Marshal led his troop right out onto the high promontory
of Delimara and looked down. They were perilously near the Ottomans, but like a gnat near a lion. The vast force would not trouble itself with them.

The Ottomans were landing on a flat, easy coast now, below the mysterious stone tombs of Tas-Silg, the burial chambers of a nameless people who had lived in the ancient past before Christ, before history.

Copier and his men could only look down helplessly from the heights as the army took shape.

The level of organization in this vast operation was astonishing. They watched longboats being lowered, men wading through the shallows with timbers and planking, ropes and hatchets, swiftly building a landing stage. Oxen driven ashore, wooden wheels bound in iron bands rolled up onto the planked sand, great gun carriages speedily assembled from beautifully carpentered parts, and the numerous guns themselves, sixty-pounders, eighty-pounders, and a few monsters of burnished bronze. Saltwater streamed from the sweating men, but not a drop touching the precious weapons, worth a small kingdom. Whole regiments of Janizaries and Sipahis came ashore, then waited patient and orderly under brightly coloured parasols, as if on a holiday.

It was the parasols that finally did it for Marshal Copier. Growling furiously into his beard about insolent swine, boy-lovers, nancying ashore with
parasols
, like
ladies of the court
, he quickly unshouldered his musket. De la Rivière’s mouth twitched with amusement, but he said nothing about the waste of a shot. Copier loaded where he sat in the saddle, none too easily, and loosed off the ball at the forty thousand men below. They never even knew where it hit. A few looked up at the bang. Perhaps a few even smiled. None stirred a hair.

‘Harassing the enemy,’ said Copier, reading his brother knight’s mind. He reshouldered the musket, the barrel hot to the touch. ‘That boulder there. How many men could shift it?’

‘Twenty? Thirty?’

‘Ten,’ said Copier. He turned in the saddle and glared back at Nicholas, still hovering some two hundred paces off. ‘Boy! Move up your white English arse, at the gallop!’

Now Nicholas came close and looked down. The sight below
was awe-inspiring, beautiful. The Ottoman army. He had dreamt of it, but never in such richness. The plumes of peacock and white egret feathers, the tall standards of horsehair and beaten silver, the gold tassels and red fezzes and green pennants incribed with the names of Allah.
Ad-Darr, Al-Qahhar, Al-Mumit
. The Afflictor, The Subduer, The Bringer of Death.

Moustachioed Janizaries in trousers and long coats, cavalrymen in light mail, religious zealots in white or green, pashas in robes of apricot and gold, semi-naked dervishes in animal skins, conical caps in duck-egg blue, white headdresses with ostrich plumes, Janizaries shouldering long muskets inlaid with arabesques of ivory, circular shields of wicker and brass, pointed shields from Hungary, curved scimitars and compound bows from the Asian steppes, flags of shot silk decorated with evil eyes, scorpions and crescent moons, flowing Arabic characters, bell tents, music and drums.

Among the massing ranks of the soldiers, the armaments and the wagons, strode a tall dark figure in swirling black robes. Even from here, Nicholas could discern a master among men. It was Mustafa Pasha. He carried a short whip in his left hand, and in his right, a scimitar ready-drawn.

‘Dismount!’ cried Copier.

They were uneasily aware that if the Turks should make speed up the slope before them, they would be cut off from flight in a minute.

‘Shoulders to the rock! Now
heave
!’

It was farcical. The boulder moved not an inch. Pedro Mezquita murmured something about Sisyphus and inspected a broken fingernail. And ahead of them, the Ottoman vanguard was already beginning to move inland, threatening to cut them off. Humiliated, the troop remounted and spurred their horses. The grand army of the Sultan had indeed landed unopposed, singing songs of victory, and there was nothing they could do. They were, as always, too few.

‘Always outnumbered, always outgunned!’ Copier bellowed into the wind as they galloped. ‘Almighty God
damn
the Kings of Christendom for milk-faced pigeon-livered slaves!’

Mustafa Pasha sent out an advance party of unarmoured slave-runners to reconnoitre the country and identify resources. They returned shamefaced, to say they had seen some partridges, a few quail.

Mustafa’s eyes gleamed like cold wet stones in his flat Anatolian face.

‘You found no livestock?’

‘No, Pasha. There was none. Everything slaughtered or gone.’

Pasha struck the slave-runner across the face with his short whip. The man remained motionless, the blood bubbling along the wound on his cheek.

‘You found none. You did not look hard enough. And forage?’

The slave shook his head. ‘They have destroyed everything and left us only a wasteland.’

Mustafa Pasha nearly struck him again and then his arm dropped.

‘The first well we come to,’ he said to a nearby Janizary officer, ‘this cur drinks it.’

‘Sire.’

He turned away. He was beginning to hate this island already. But the infidels’ stubbornness and opposition would only make their punishment worse in the end. He watched the unloading. Coming up now were bundles of tied stakes for entrenchments. But they could also be used for the impalement and crucifixion of the Christians.

He took a deep breath. The omens remained good. It was the month of Shawwal, in year 972 of the Hegirah of the Prophet. For the Christians it was 1565, dated from the birth of the Jewish teacher Jesus, whom they worshipped in their blasphemous idiocy as Allah Himself. Surely they would learn. Surely his own scimitar would teach them the error of their ways.

The Ottoman army marched forth, the small band of Copier and his cavalry shadowing them all the way, sometimes no further off than half a mile. The Turks would only exhaust themselves giving chase, and the troop would soon be back within the walls of Birgu.

Yet they had to watch from a distance, in agony, as a five-hundred-strong
marching Janizary vanguard, with the dark figure of Mustafa at their head on a nodding white stallion, ungelded and mettlesome, occupied each village in turn. They fired what buildings remained, cut down the last few trees and added them to their enormous store of siege materials in the following wagons. The precious rare timber of the island turned against it. Copier’s rage grew.

They reined in beneath the flickering shade of a small lemon grove on a hill, no more than a hummock, and quieted their horses. Don Mezquita said with his aristocratic drawl, ‘I’m all for a splendid cavalry charge. Grand Marshal?’

Before them on the burning plain, Mustafa and his Janizaries surrounded a cluster of village houses and a farmstead.

The inhabitants did not conceal themselves. Twenty or so, they came forward, neither fleeing nor bowing. The women in dresses, veiled, the men in high-belted white trousers, barefoot, their heads turbanned. The younger children standing staring at the approaching soldiers, flies settling round their mouths and noses, naked among the slain animals.

Mustafa pulled up before them.

‘Where are your stores? Your fattest goats that you have hidden from us?’

A woman spoke for them, in the impudent way of Christian women.

‘We only eat pork,’ she mocked, and spat in the dust.

‘You are a foolish woman.’

She laughed.

Mustafa struck her across the face.

Before him, Nicholas saw Copier lean forward in his saddle, hands gripping the pommel white-knuckled.

The Janizaries suddenly spread wide and began to encircle the settlement.

Mustafa said, ‘Kill her. Enslave the rest. Burn the houses.’

The woman said, ‘You will burn in hell.’

Mustafa turned his stony eyes on her. ‘You will feel the flames of hell before I do.’

Copier drew his sword. The rest did likewise, Nicholas with
shaking hand, barely able to believe what was about to happen. Don Mezquita whistled a tune.

Five hundred Janizaries.

Copier turned to Don Mezquita. ‘You, sir. You will not ride with us, but back to Birgu to report.’

Don Mezquita instantly flared with anger, but Copier quelled him.

‘You are under my command, sir, and will follow orders. We will harry the enemy, but you will ride onward and report.’

Mezquita rose up on his stirrups, his mouth twitching with fury beneath his magnificent moustache, whipped his reins down hard on his horse’s withers and rode off at a gallop across the plain, hallooing all the way, desperate for one or two of the Turks to pursue him so that at least he might taste a fight and win glory. None of them did. They simply glanced up and watched with screwed-up eyes as the Christian madman galloped away in a cloud of dust.

‘I was thinking,’ said the Janizary to his comrade, wiping the blood from his scimitar on the woman’s grubby peasant dress and eyeing her headless torso. ‘Since landing on this cursed rock, we’ve not met one coward yet. Even the women.’

The other Janizary looked up and said, almost amused, ‘And now we are under attack.’

Nicholas’s white mare galloped hard, her head straining forward, mane flying. He spurred her on and levelled his cinquedea before him, yelling wildly. The ten of them spread out into a natural line, the two fastest horses pulling ahead by half a length, a length. The Janizaries ahead of them still stumbling about in disbelief, without order and, more importantly, without pikes or halberds. This ghost troop, this small pack of scouts that had trailed them all the way from Marsasirocco, was now on the attack. It was barely conceivable.

Then they crashed into the milling infantrymen and with a locked arm, Nicholas swept his blade low and flat and cut a man deep across his face. He heard a screaming behind him.

Now they were within the circle of Janizaries, losing formation, pulling their horses round to ride back again, to keep free space and use their speed and be able to escape afterwards, after this lightning strike. The trapped peasants of the steading stared about
bewildered. They had expected enslavement, beating, but not a battlefield. One or two impetuously ran to their tumbledown sheds for a pick or hoe. One was cut down by a big Janizary even as he ran. Another was pinned against a wall, sliding slowly, a red stain on the whitewash behind him.

A harsh voice was calling out in Turkish, Mustafa on his white stallion. Suddenly it came to Nicholas what his fate might be. He pulled around and made for the voice. Two Janizaries blocked his way. He tried to crash his horse through them but the terrified mare reared and he slipped back, scrabbling at the reins, dropping his sword. One of the Janizaries tried to cut his leg but he rolled off the other side and the beast took the blow. A horse’s scream was a terrible sound.

Unarmed now, he rolled up from the earth with dust in his hands.
Use anything, throw anything
. Everything moved at slow speed. The Janizaries were onto him, yet he had time. With two handfuls of dust he would take them. He threw one, the fellow turned, thrust his sword at him, Nicholas took one swift step back and it was enough. It was a lazy thrust. At the same time he transferred the other handful of dust to his right for better throwing and cast it, all in one smooth movement, fast as a snake. It hit his man full in the face, he gasped and blinked, the back of his hand to his eyes.

There was a short shadow on the ground beside him, a Turk coming behind to finish him. The blinded man was standing still. Nicholas kicked out hard and caught the fellow in his stones beneath his flowing robes. A guttural grunt. He bent double. Away to his left galloped De la Rivière, hewing down a Janizary caught off guard, and then two arrows flew and thocked into man or horse, and he knew that De la Rivière had gone down. Now he would use his sword, that famous swordsmanship, the finest in France they said. How many Turks would he take with him?