The Last Crusaders: The Great Siege (42 page)

He turned back and the fellow with the slashed face was swinging wildly, half blinded, but he was big and strong and had been cut many times before, and now he was angry. He swore and shouted, and more troops were coming round the starpoint to the west, along with a couple of stark naked Bekta
ş
is, who seemed to be carrying severed heads as well as narrow spears.

He could not fight them all. It was a wonder he could fight any. There was one last trick. He dropped to his one good knee and bowed his head in weary surrender, and the Janizary stepped up to behead him, and seeing his red leather boots in the dust feet before him, judging his stance and position, in a flash Nicholas drove the dagger sharply upwards into the man’s groin. He felt the white silk wet with blood and urine, clinging hotly to his hand as he snatched it away. The Janizary screamed in agony and something like terror, unmanned.

The boy did not wait to finish him, but hauled Stanley along by his belt. Twenty yards away came on a dozen men at the run to kill him, fresh and eager. And yes, those were severed heads that the Bekta
ş
is clutched, their bloody fingers plaited in dark matted hair, babbling and singing of Allah and his works.

He raised Stanley under the armpits now and hauled him, heels in the dust. They went down half crawling, half falling over the heaped sandstone boulders below, a bloody dagger clamped between Nicholas’s front teeth, the Janizary’s hot metallic blood running from the blade over his own lips like those of some Carib cannibal. They flopped into the lapping shallows and Nicholas heaved the knight out on his back into a larger deep-water inlet, the pursuers gathering immediately above them. None had musket balls left in their pouches, they had wasted them all in joyous firing into the air at the fall of Elmo, or he and Stanley would have been dead
by now. They jabbered on the rock and began to clamber down, blades glinting.

There was the flat timber from the smashed fishing boat where he had observed it and planned it days before.

A skin-and-bone Bekta
ş
i scrambled down to him, eyes rolling, naked but for a sheen of Christian blood in which he seemed to be slathered from crown to toe, as if he had anointed himself in bloody baptism. Nicholas pushed Stanley back against a rock, eyes closed but mouth open, still breathing, and turned on the dervish as another jumped into the water the other side of the rocks. Nicholas waded forward and smacked the knife out of the Bekta
ş
i’s hand with his forearm and then grabbed him by his bony shoulders and unbalanced him by pulling him abruptly forward into the water. The dervish came up spluttering, the blood of his enemies washing from his dark skin. It was horrible to feel the weight of the fanatic buoyed in the water, as light as a child. For many years he had fasted his frame down to nothing but skin and bone for the love of Allah, and so it was with ease that Nicholas gripped his head under the chin and smashed it back against the boulder once, twice, three times, until even his fanatic arms had no strength, and his skull no longer knocked on the stone but made a wet, soft noise. The dervish never gave a blow with his long thin axe.

The other was swimming round to him but frenziedly, flapping like a dog. Nicholas swam out to him and took the dagger from between his teeth and raised it high and stabbed down into the floundering swimmer’s skinny back. The dervish’s head went below the water. He stabbed and stabbed and stabbed until the white sea foam turned pink in the sinless moonlight, and he knew he had lost all restraint and become merely murderous and all his boyhood innocence was gone.

The air was filled with shouts, they were calling urgently for musketeers to come up and kill these two fugitive wretches. But he paid no more heed to the bloody wreck of Elmo behind him, nor the blood-stained promontory of Sciberras. He pulled Stanley out into the water and draped him on his back over the middle of the spar. The spar sunk down only a little, Stanley’s fair locks trailing in the water, his beard beaded with pearls, eyes closed, but breathing, still breathing.

Then he pushed the weight out over the water, and gripped the near end, and began to kick.

At any moment, another might have been swimming beside him, slicing into him. Or musket balls peppering the water around him, and then his world going red and then black. But it never happened. He never knew why.

The Birgu shore seemed as far distant as some uncharted coast of the Americas.

He would never know how long he kicked, panted, rested, sometimes flopped over onto his back and lay floating in the salt sea of the great harbour, unable to move either himself or his friend another yard. And then after perhaps five minutes, the stars moving visibly overhead, and shouts and cries still coming from the inferno of Elmo, he would roll over again on his front and rest his chin on the half-submerged spar of timber, seawater flowing over his face, and kick forward that way, arms draped without strength, turning his face aside to take breath, stopping more and more frequently, kicking less and less, drifting often.

Lights twinkled on the Birgu shore, but they seemed more like a taunt than comfort. So far away.

Where the water streamed past the jagged ends of the spars as they inched forward, he saw clouds of glowing green phosphorescence. Drowned stars.

The five hundred yard crossing took him perhaps two or three hours. At any time a sharp-eyed sniper on Is-Salvatur might yet have tried to hit him in the water by moonlight. But he felt strangely past caring. He rested and kicked and rested. What would be would be. He could do no more.

A little later as he lay on his back, and Elmo looked a little further off, the high walls of San Angelo loomed a little nearer, he sucked in air and began to feel light-headed. Almost as if he might start to laugh. He knew it was only exhaustion.

On the heights of Sciberras there was immense activity by torchlight and lantern light and the bright aid of the moon. Not at Elmo, but westward at the vast Ottoman camp, and around the trenches and gun platforms. They were already being dismantled. He tried to see with his tired, salt-bleared eyes. The tents and pavilions were being taken down, the great guns roped and craned onto the
massive wheeled wagons. He could hear the oxen bellow and low as they were driven into their teams and the thick leather yokes set on their muscled backs once more. He could hear the roll of the heavy ironbound wheels, perhaps even the ground and the water trembling under that massive weight. And many men marching away by orange torchlight, a drum sounding, standards raised high in the night. Then he could have laughed.

They were breaking camp already. The moment Elmo fell, Mustafa Pasha had given the order. They were already pulling back off Sciberras, returning past the low-lying Marsa, and over the Corradino Heights to Santa Margherita and the ruins of its ancient monastery. They were coming back to Birgu, the greatest prize, and the key to the island of Malta.

It could be as soon as dawn tomorrow that the great brazen guns would begin to roar again. Elmo would lie deathly quiet, smouldering, forgotten. And he and Stanley had escaped the quiet of that grave, to swim back into the cannon’s mouth once more.

He could have laughed.

With the last defenders tortured to death or beheaded, none having uttered a word under torture, Mustafa Pasha rode back to make a final survey of the paltry ruins. As he sat on his white horse in the moonlight, he revolved in his mind the figures: eighteen thousand cannonballs used, some seventy thousand pounds of gunpowder. About a fifth of their supplies. Cannonballs could be retrieved and re-used, some of them. But they had no access to more gunpowder except from Stamboul herself, nearly a thousand miles away. Worst of all was the cost in Turkish and allied dead. The siege of Elmo alone had consumed nearly a quarter of his forces. Some eight thousand dead or wounded beyond fighting more. Against some two or three hundred defenders. It was scarcely credible.

Then he lifted up his stony eyes and gazed across the Grand Harbour.

From Birgu rose a great curtain of silence, high into the starlit sky. In response to the tragic spectacle of valiant Elmo, valiant beyond words, now fallen at last, and with the banner of a false and arrogant religion polluting its walls, there came only a grave and mighty silence.

In the heart of the night, many brothers and citizens gathered on the walls of the city to witness the death of the little fort that had died for them. And as often with the death of a loved one, relative or friend, silence was the truest expression of grief.

Even Mustafa Pasha spoke little as he surveyed the devastation, the bodies, and eyed with distaste the various mutilations practised on the corpses by the laughing, maddened Bekta
ş
is.

‘In the name of Allah,’ he was heard to murmur, looking across to Birgu once more. ‘If the son has cost us so much, what will the father cost us?’

Nicholas came back to Birgu as he arrived at Elmo before, not knowing when or how. The two broken refugees were hauled from the water by stout fishermen on the Kalkara shore, just below the walls of San Angelo, and given watered wine to drink. Nicholas knelt, for he could not yet stand, and put the trembling cup to his lips and gulped it down. He thought he was at the Mass. Then he handed the cup to the figure beside him. His eyes and understanding were so blurred, he did not know exactly who it was.

The fishermen helped them and they both stood upright with great effort, swaying, barely seeing or hearing, their senses far way. But exhausted as they were, something fresh coursed in their veins, along with the wine and water. They were back in the city. Birgu. They had escaped Elmo. Their brothers were all slain there.

Stanley said, his voice his own once more, ‘
And we only are alone escaped to tell thee
.’

The wound to his head ran with fresh blood thinned with saltwater, his fair hair was darkly plastered, his wounds too many to count, his clothes like Nicholas’s own a disgrace of blackened and bloody tatters. Yet they both lived, and with their full senses. The healing power of seawater was deep and mysterious. Along with all the deep sorrow of Elmo’s fall, and the bitterness of this war that had barely begun, they felt a surge of powerful contradictory joy: the ancient primitive joy of the survivor.

Around them the people and then more and more knights came to greet them and look on with wonder and relief. Young boys ran off to spread the word that though Elmo was indeed fallen, yet
two had escaped alive, and before long the word was all over the town. La Valette was immediately informed, and according to his prompt orders, in the heart of the night, aged sacristans shuffled up darkened spiral stairways in cobwebbed towers to ring solitary stark iron bells. It was the second time the bells of Birgu’s churches had rung tonight, the first time with a more direful peel. The two fugitives had not heard that earlier peel across the water, their ears deafened and bleeding with the roar of cannon.

In response to the joyful tolling of bells, heads turned and glared across the water from the Turkish column. Mustafa’s eyes burned black. What were the slaves celebrating now? No help had come. No help would come. Ottoman intelligence was sure. The Christians had as much sense of unity and brotherhood as weasels fighting in a hole.

Nicholas and Stanley looked at each other and then embraced. Two figures that might have come up from the deep ocean, or from another world imagined by the poets. A man and a boy, who had that look in their eyes and that strength in their bearing, however weakened their frames, of two who had walked with death for many days and weeks and not been destroyed by it.

The scene was unreal after the abattoir of Elmo. People lined the streets and cheered as if in nocturnal starlit fiesta, torches blazing, faces smiling and people calling out blessings on the heroes and curses on the coming Turks, arms raised, fists clenched. The streets eerily untouched as yet by cannon fire and war.

The two went down the Street of the Knights unwillingly in the role of returning heroes, still feeling themselves to be but the last pitiful pair of refugees from a grievous loss. But to the people they were warriors from the ballads and stories, and women sang and cast flowers, rose petals and sprigs of rosemary, and men clapped their shoulders and hailed them as brothers.

Nicholas could have fainted, or dropped to his knees and sobbed, but he and Stanley walked steadily thorough all the magic and the unreality of the moment, nodding graciously, knowing that for the people to celebrate now, with such zeal, was far more important than their own private sentiments. An ancient Jewish fiddler pushed forward through the crowd and walked along behind them in their torchlit procession, playing a stately Spanish dance, a courtly
pavane. The two of them, knight and boy, stained with blood and salt and exhausted beyond speech, had spoken barely a word since crawling ashore, not a word in reply to the clamorous questions and the showers of praise, but gazed mutely with surging sorrow and remembrance of horror and comrades lost, and of the great wordless gulf that separates those who have lived through war from those who have not.

But now all around them and their sorrowful silence there was laughter and music and dancing as if this night was fair day or high holiday. Maidens crying to see such heroes among men, men admiring, and the two of them stepping forward to the tune of this sweet melancholy pavane, all passion under immaculate restraint and formal ceremony, like all courtly dances, and walking in measure to the music. More street musicians joined the aged Jew, and the music swelled.

Then through the crowd which shimmered and moved apart, there came a figure, and she reached out towards the boy. Like two of the courtliest dancers in all of Europe, a gentleman and his fine lady, she held out her slim hand upward, palm outward, and they touched palms as pilgrims do. She wore a pale blue dress, her only dress, and amid all the laughter and folly and rejoicing around them, as if the worst was not yet to come, her dark eyes fixed upon him with deadly seriousness, and no one else was there. There was only the battered bloodied boy soldier and the slim virgin girl. Their palms touched, and they turned and danced, moved left and then turned and back, to the slow stately pavane, the Jewish fiddler and his fellows picking up the time. The boy’s exhaustion was great, he moved slowly, and the fiddlers played with it.