The Last Crusaders: The Great Siege (41 page)

The world was ruptured by an explosion so vast that it was some time before any there, defender or attacker, could shake his thoughts into sense. With animal instinct, Nicholas simply cowered behind the cordon, his face pressed so hard against the wickerwork of a
gabion that it left an imprint on his cheek, his arms over his head, lumps of rock and stone showering down around him. None struck him, mercifully. One alone might have broken his arm.

A long time passed. The darkened sky gradually cleared, the ringing in their ears slowly subsided. There was stunned silence from all sides.

They squinted out. Clouds of dust and smoke hung like ragged veils over the ravelin. Or where the ravelin had been. As the veils slowly cleared they saw nothing but a field of rubble. They could not even discern any human remains.

Medrano said, ‘When we laid the charge, as you see, we still had plenty of powder. In those far-off days.’

The water itself was now foul to the taste, but men’s tongues and lips were black with thirst. There were no more frontal attacks that day. Medrano thought he knew why, but he said nothing to the men.

Stanley understood too. He said quietly, ‘They are confident of breaking in soon another way.’

Medrano’s lean, sallow face looked at its most grave and composed. ‘I think they will soon blow the main gates at the cavalier. A mining gang was round there. Then they will be in. There is no more we can do.’

‘But look what we have done,’ said Stanley. ‘How many days did we win for Birgu?’

‘Many,’ said Medrano, and his sweat-streaked, dirt-streaked face showed a distant smile. ‘We lost count how many. But many days we bought for our brothers over the water. Our Grand Master will have made sure Birgu is now defended as best as it can be.’

‘And we died honourably, did we not?’ said Stanley, his voice soft and low.

Medrano liked the past tense. ‘We died honourably,’ he said. ‘As at Acre, as at Jerusalem. As Knights Hospitaller should die.’

Before a huge column of Janizaries, fresh and armed and bathed and scented with rosewater for the fall, Mustapha Pasha strode and screamed derision. They shifted with painful discomfort, looked down at their feet and bore it in silence as they must.

‘So-called Sons of the Sultan!’ he raged. ‘You have fought these last days and weeks like women! The dogs and pigs of Christendom, they laugh at you, they call you little girls, daughters of Eve, of Lilith! They think you are men with breasts, fit only for sewing and baking!’

The Janizaries glowered and clutched their sword hilts tighter.

‘Now go out and destroy them, your most ancient enemies! They who have killed so many of your beloved brothers. Instruct them in the way of the Janizary, teach them that there can never be forgiveness and mercy between Islam and the Cross, and show them that you are men, not women, and understand how to kill.’

Dusk fell on Elmo, and with it an ominous, oppressive sense of expectation. Now they were only waiting for the end.

Stanley spoke to the boy. ‘You are not mortally injured.’

‘I’m bad enough.’ He hurt all over. Even tiredness could not dull it.

‘The Turks will be in very soon now. I think tonight. You must escape. Go over the south-east wall and down to the rocks. I know you can swim.’

‘I go if you go.’

‘I can’t swim. And I will not abandon my brothers. I am a knight, you are—’

‘Just a vagabond orphan and exile.’

‘No.’ Stanley smiled gently. ‘You are a deal more than that.’

‘So you’ll not try to come?’

He shook his head. ‘It is not the way for me.’

‘Smith still lives, but mortally wounded.’

Stanley looked enquiring.

‘If he set eyes on you again, lying there in the Sacred Infirmary – you know he would rally. That would be better medicine for him than all the skill and art of Fra Reynaud. You know how he would come to himself then, fight off his sickness and fevers with all his strength. And then you could both join in the fight for Birgu. You know you will be needed there.’

‘You argue with all the guile of a Vatican cardinal, boy.’

‘Besides, La Valette will want to hear of the Battle of Elmo from survivors.’

‘You will survive. But not I. As I say, here is the way to death for me. Here at Elmo.’

The boy looked so haunted and sad in the gathering darkness, fitfully lit by guttering fires. Stanley knew that he and Smith between them were something like fathers to him now. And he would only lose them again. Yet a knight’s duty was not to his fellow men, but with all stern unbending piety towards God alone.

‘When the Turks come in, you will go,’ he said. ‘I will give you the shove myself. Return to Smith, and to Birgu. The family, and – the girl.’

Nicholas looked at him sharply, but Stanley was beyond teasing now.

Nicholas said, ‘If you look out from the south-east wall – what’s left of it – on the rocks below you will see a broad flat timber washed up. From the boat of the two fishermen, destroyed by the guns of Is-Salvatur.’

‘Yes?’

‘Immediately below on the rocks,’ persisted the boy. ‘You say you cannot swim. Wood floats. Do you follow me?’

‘I follow your meaning,’ said Stanley. ‘Surely you should be a wily diplomat for the Vatican when you are grown. But—’

It was not a big explosion, but measured just sufficient by the expert Mameluke engineers to blow open an entrance below the cavalier, and then swiftly another charge was placed at the foot of the stout wooden gates into the fort. One or two knights hauled themselves to their feet where they lay in the inner yard, and tried to make it up the steps to fire down on the miners. But it was hopeless. The Turks proceeded with ruthless speed and efficiency, knowing that the defenders were now too reduced and exhausted to pose a threat to them as they worked, and the snipers and gunners out on the ravelin gave them added cover. There came a muffled crump from beyond the gates and the gates shuddered. Another few moments and they would be in.

From the north wall a cry went up. An immense column of Janizaries was moving fast and wide round the back of Elmo, a captain at their head bellowing out to the engineers to get that gate down now, they were coming in. The miners worked frenziedly, packing up another pile of powder below the hinges of the right gate.

With the Janizaries came a rabblement of Bekta
ş
is, daggers clutched in their fists, howling the ten thousand names of God, eyes bloodshot and deranged. Some split off and came rushing the bridges to distract the last of the defenders from the main gate.

‘Kill! Kill! Kill in the name of Allah!’

At last their time had come.

‘
What is my strength, that I should hope?
’ murmured Stanley. ‘
And what is mine end, that I should prolong my life?
’

It was the final moments of Elmo.

‘The last stand!’ bellowed Captain Miranda with bitter humour, crawling out into the yard dragging a stool with him. He could no longer stand. He dragged the stool up in front of the wooden gates and hauled himself into it, and then there he sat – Nicholas would never forget the sight of it – amid the blackened ruins of the fort, eerily lit by the dancing orange flames that still burned. Miranda drew his great two-handed sword from his scabbard and held it out in front of him. Since he could no longer stand, both his legs wounded and half eaten away with black infection, he would fight his last battle sitting down.

His men, García and Zacosta, stood beside their captain to the
last. The night sky serene above them. All around the inner yard, and on the walls above, men lying dead under wooden beams, men slumped over barrels stuck with feathered arrows, men standing impaled by spears, men burned beyond recognising, half buried in rubble and shattered stone.

Fewer than thirty remained to fight, some gathering close round the seated Miranda, and others pulling back to the steps of the little chapel with Medrano, their backs to the wall, there to finish their lives and the human pilgrimage.

Fra Giacomo, the only chaplain who still lived, burned the few sparse tapestries, icons and furnishings within the chapel, so that the heathen should not desecrate them. Then he kneeled before the altar, his back to the doorway through which they would come, and bowed his head in prayer.

Another muffled explosion, and very slowly, as if in a dream, amid soft billows of pale dust, the gates fell in and hit the ground, and the Janizaries swarmed over them.

Miranda was shot dead in his chair, still swinging his sword. García was hurled to the ground but picked himself up and managed to seize a pike, before he was beheaded with a scimitar. The others were cut down on the steps of the chapel, and Fra Giacomo slain where he knelt, his lips moving in prayer to the last. One by one they perished.

Medrano died lighting a beacon fire to tell Birgu that Elmo was lost. But as he lay dying on the bastion top, he saw the fire blaze up, and saw the Janizaries let it burn. Let them know across the water that Elmo was lost. Let them know that now it was Birgu’s turn.

The flag of St John, what remnants remained of it, was hauled down and the crescent moon of Islam raised in its stead, to a mighty cheer of
Allahu Akhbar!

A Bekta
ş
i dervish hurled himself down onto Stanley from the walls above, a twenty foot drop, and both tumbled into the dust. They rolled together until the knight caved his windpipe in with a blow of his forearm, and leapt to his feet again, unhelmed. Then several shots were fired and either a ball itself or a chip of stone struck the side of his head and he careened running into Nicholas against the wall. He slumped back, eyes closed.

Holding his sword in his right hand, Nicholas hooked the knight’s right arm over his shoulders and put his left arm around the knight’s waist and seized hold of his broad leather sword belt for better grip, dragging him back into the shadows of the colonnade below the south wall. Stanley’s head was rolling alarmingly, he was badly concussed and muttering. Blood streamed from his head wound over Nicholas’s shoulder.

Nicholas dragged him to the foot of the steps under the colonnade, expecting at every moment to feel long cold steel thrust into his backbone, and he prayed with desperation, sweat pouring down his face, prickling his armpits, trying to ignore the dull throbbing ache of his deep-bruised left elbow. The knight might have weighed twice as much as him in full armour, yet he dragged him along, gasping, muscles tearing.

‘Move your legs,’ he hissed.

Stanley mumbled, ‘
This is the beginnings of sorrows
…’

Nicholas kicked him violently in the side of his calf and Stanley began to take some of his own weight on listless legs.

The boy glanced back out into the moonlit yard and saw Zacosta struck down and on his knees, gouting blood, yet still sweeping his sword wide and low before him, cutting clean through a Turk’s leg just above the foot. He toppled forward and five more swords were raised over him.

He looked away. They came to the foot of the steps and somehow, God alone willing, he half walked, half dragged the bewildered Stanley up them. They emerged onto the height of the ravaged south wall and without a moment’s hesitation, knowing that this was probably when they would be killed, Nicholas broke into a low shuffling run, dragging along the man beside him, thigh muscles screaming, to hurl themselves over the wall. Yet the Janizaries were there already.

Fighting against every base natural instinct to turn Stanley as a shield, he thrust his right side forward and stabbed at a Janizary, who laughed and said something in mocking Turkish about how he was too burdened to fight a good fight. But if Nicholas let Stanley drop, he would never get him up again. The Janizary switched left and right, eyes gleaming, the sea brilliantly moonlit behind his dancing silhouette, and then Nicholas lunged so fast and unexpectedly that
he drove the sword point low under the Turk’s waist-sash and he gulped and bent double. He pulled his reeking blade free and left him there, and hauled Stanley onward, the knight muttering that he was blinded by the moon.

Something thumped them from behind, Stanley taking the blow. It was a musket butt, the concussed knight felt little. Nicholas, already bent at the knees, swivelled round as hard as he could, sword out wide, and sliced into the fellow’s hamstrings. There was no time to finish him, but he hoped that would stay him enough. They staggered to the brink of the parapet flattened by cannon fire, he dropped his sword to the ground, more dangerous to take than to leave, and dragged them both over the edge.

Like a drunk man, Stanley hit the steeply sloping rocky ground twenty feet below and rolled on down without apparent injury, coming to rest entangled in the last clumps of brushwood before they gave out to bare sea-washed rock. Nicholas screamed out in agony, he couldn’t help himself, landing with hands outstretched, palms scraped raw, one knee feeling as if it had fully shattered, hipbone bashed, feet curled up and red with pain. But of course the Turks had the fort surrounded by men, and some were already running over to where they lay to finish them.

Stanley flopped over onto his back, his wounded arm useless, gazing up at the dark Mediterranean summer night with his blue English eyes, murmuring softly to himself words Nicholas could no longer understand. The air was filled with the sweet aromatic smell of crushed thyme, the first sweet smell they had known in weeks, and Stanley smiled.

Only the boy could save him, the knight was finished.

He came to his feet, snatching the dagger from its sheath on Stanley’s belt, and closed tight into the nearest Janizary, to the soldier’s surprise. Well inside the sweep of his sword, almost embracing him, Nicholas butted him in the face with the top of his head and then stuck the dagger into his side rapidly, four or five times. He pushed his lifeless body away, gasped at the fresh hot stab of pain in his knee, eyed the two other Janizaries circling him warily. One glanced across at Stanley lying murmurous amid the thyme, carolling, smiling at the stars, and went over quickly to despatch him with a sliced throat while his fellow Janizary dealt
with the boy. Nicholas cried out and moved faster than even he knew he could move. He slashed the nearer man across the face and hurtled through the bloody spray to fall on the fellow kneeling beside Stanley like a ministering angel of death. He clamped his left hand over his mouth, wrenched his head back and pulled the dagger hard across his muscular throat, slitting the windpipe. The air whistling free from his lungs, still redolent of tobacco smoke.